III

The liberalism of Burke is most apparent in his handling of the immediate issues of the age.  Upon Ireland, America and India, he was at every point upon the side of the future.  Where constitutional reform was in debate no man saw more clearly than he the evils that needed remedy; though, to a later generation, his own schemes bear the mark of timid conservatism.  In the last decade of his life he encountered the greatest cataclysm unloosed upon Europe since the Reformation, and it is not too much to say that at every point he missed the essence of its meaning.  Yet even upon France and the English Constitution he was full of practical sagacity.  Had his warning been uttered without the fury of hate that accompanied it, he might well have guided the forces of the Revolution into channels that would have left no space for the military dictatorship he so marvellously foresaw.  Had he perceived the real evils of the aristocratic monopoly against which he so eloquently inveighed, forty barren years might well have been a fruitful epoch of wise and continuous reform.  But Burke was not a democrat, and, at bottom, he had little regard for that popular sense of right which, upon occasion, he was ready to praise.  What impressed him was less the evils of the constitution than its possibilities, could the defects quite alien from its nature but be pruned away.  Moments, indeed, there are of a deeper vision, and it is not untrue to say that the best answer to Burke’s conservatism is to be found in his own pages.  But he was too much the apostle of order to watch with calm the struggles involved in the overthrow of privilege.  He had too much the sense of a Divine Providence taking thought for the welfare of men to interfere with violence in his handiwork.  The tinge of caution is never absent, even from his most liberal moments; and he was willing to endure great evil if it seemed dangerous to estimate the cost of change.

His American speeches are the true text-book for colonial administration.  He put aside the empty plea of right which satisfied legal pedants like George Grenville.  What moved him was the tragic fashion in which men clung to the shadow of a power they could not maintain instead of searching for the roots of freedom.  He never concealed from himself that the success of America was bound up with the maintenance of English liberties.  “Armies,” he said many years later, “first victorious over Englishmen, in a conflict for English constitutional rights and privileges, and afterwards habituated (though in America) to keep an English people in a state of abject subjection, would prove fatal in the end to the liberties of England itself.”  He had firm hold of that insidious danger which belittles freedom itself in the interest of curtailing some special desire.  “In order to prove that the Americans have no right to their liberties,” he said in the famous Speech on Conciliation with America (1775), “we