Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 07

By E. L. Godkin

Edmund Burke, born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1729, was the son of a successful attorney, who gave him as good an education as the times and the country afforded. He went to school to an excellent Quaker, and graduated at Trinity College in 1748. He appears to have then gone to London in 1750 to "keep terms," as it was called, at the Middle Temple, with the view of being admitted to the bar, in obedience to his father's desire and ambition. But the desultory habit of mind, the preference for literature and philosophical speculation to connected study, which had marked his career in college, followed him and prevented any serious application to the law. His father's patience was after a while exhausted, and he withdrew Burke's allowance and left him to his own resources.

This was in 1755, but in 1756 he married, and made his first appearance in the literary world by the publication of a book. About these years from 1750 to 1759 little is known. He published two works, one a treatise on the 'Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,' and the other a 'Vindication of Natural Society,' a satire on Bolingbroke. Stray allusions and anecdotes about other men in the diaries and correspondence of the time show that he frequented the literary coffee-houses, and was gradually making an impression on the authors and wits whom he met there. Besides the two books we have mentioned, he produced some smaller things, such as an 'Essay on the Drama,' and part of an 'Abridgment of the History of England.' But although these helped to secure him admission to the literary set, they did not raise him out of the rank of obscure literary adventurers, who from the Revolution of 1688, and especially after the union with Scotland, began to swarm to London from all parts of the three kingdoms. The first recognition of him as a serious writer was his employment by Dodsley the bookseller, at a salary of $100 a year, to edit the Annual Register, which Dodsley founded in 1769. Considered as a biographical episode, this may fairly be treated as a business man's certificate that Burke was industrious and accurate. As his income from his father was withdrawn or reduced in 1755, there remain four years during which his way of supporting himself is unknown. His published works were certainly not "pot-boilers." He was probably to some extent dependent on his wife's father, Dr. Nugent, an Irish physician who when Burke made his acquaintance lived in Bath, but after his daughter's marriage settled in London, and seems to have frequented and have been acceptable in the same coffee-houses as Burke, and for the same reasons. But Burke was not a man to remain long dependent on any one. These nine years were evidently not spent fruitlessly. They had made him known and brought him to the threshold of public life.

In 1759, political discussion as we understand it--that is, those explorations of the foundations of political society and analyses of social relations which now form our daily intellectual food--was hardly known. The interest in religion as the chief human concern was rapidly declining. The interest in human society as an organism to be studied, and if need be, taken to pieces and put together again, was only just beginning. Montesquieu's great work, 'The Spirit of the Laws,' which demanded for expediency and convenience in legislation the place which modern Europe had long assigned to authority, had only appeared in 1748. Swift's satires had made serious breaches in the wall of convention by which the State, in spite of the convulsions of the seventeenth century, was still surrounded. But the writer whose speculations excited most attention in England was Bolingbroke. The charm of his style and the variety of his interests made him the chief intellectual topic of the London world in Burke's early youth. To write like Bolingbroke was a legitimate ambition for a young man. It is not surprising that Burke felt it, and that his earliest political effort was a satire on Bolingbroke. It attracted the attention of a politician, Gerard Hamilton, and he quickly picked up Burke as his secretary, treated him badly, and was abandoned by him in disgust at the end of six years.

The peculiar condition of the English governmental machine made possible for men of Burke's kind at this period what would not be possible now. The population had vanished from a good many old boroughs, although their representation in Parliament remained, and the selection of the members fell to the lords of the soil. About one hundred and fifty members of the House of Commons were in this way chosen by great landed proprietors, and it is to be said to their credit that they used their power freely to introduce unknown young men of talent into public life. Moreover in many cases, if not in most, small boroughs, however well peopled, were expected to elect the proprietor's nominee. Burke after leaving Hamilton's service was for a short time private secretary to Lord Rockingham, when the latter succeeded Grenville in the Ministry in 1766; but when he went out, Burke obtained a seat in Parliament in 1765 in the manner we have described, for the borough of Wendover, from Lord Verney, who owned it. He made his first successful speech the same year, and was complimented by Pitt. He was already recognized as a man of enormous information, as any one who edited the Annual Register had to be.

A man of such powers and tastes in that day naturally became a pamphleteer. Outside of Parliament there was no other mode of discussing public affairs. The periodical press for purposes of discussion did not exist. During and after the Great Rebellion, the pamphlet had made its appearance as the chief instrument of controversy. Defoe used it freely after the Restoration. Swift made a great hit with it, and probably achieved the first sensational sale with his pamphlet on 'The Conduct of the Allies.' Bolingbroke's 'Patriot King' was a work of the same class. As a rule the pamphlet exposed or refuted somebody, even if it also freely expounded. It was inevitable that Burke should early begin to wield this most powerful of existing weapons. His antagonist was ready for him in the person of George Grenville, the minister who had made way for Burke's friend and patron Lord Rockingham. Grenville showed, as easily as any party newspaper in our own day, that Rockingham and his friends had ruined the country by mismanagement of the war and of the finances. Burke refuted him with a mastery of facts and figures, and a familiarity with the operations of trade and commerce, and a power of exposition and illustration, and a comprehension of the fundamental conditions of national economy, which at once made him famous and a necessary man for the Whigs in the great struggle with the Crown on which they were entering.

The nature of this struggle cannot be better described in brief space than by saying that the King, from his accession to the throne down to the close of the American War, was engaged in a persistent effort to govern through ministers chosen and dismissed, as the German ministers are now, by himself; while the subservience of Parliament was secured by the profuse use of pensions and places. To this attempt, and all the abuses which inevitably grew out of it, the Whigs with Burke as their intellectual head offered a determined resistance, and the conflict was one extraordinarily well calculated to bring his peculiar powers into play.

The leading events in this long struggle were the attempt of the House of Commons to disqualify Wilkes for a seat in the House, to punish reporting their debates as a breach of privilege, and the prosecution of the war against the American colonies. It may be said to have begun at the accession of the King, and to have lasted until the resignation of Lord North after the surrender of Cornwallis, or from 1770 to 1783.

Burke's contributions to it were his pamphlet, 'Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents,' and several speeches in Parliament: the first, like the pamphlet, on the general situation, and others on minor incidents in the struggle. This pamphlet has not only survived the controversy, but has become one of the most famous papers in the political literature of the Anglo-Saxon race. It is a century since every conspicuous figure in the drama passed away; it is seventy years since every trace of the controversy disappeared from English political life; most if not all of the principles for which Burke contended have become commonplaces of English constitutional practice; the discontents of that day have vanished as completely as those of 1630: but Burke's pamphlet still holds a high place in every course of English literature, and is still read and pondered by every student of constitutional history and by every speculator on government and political morals.