In Defense of Politics
David Bromwich’s portrait of statesman Edmund Burke (1730–1797) is the first biography to attend to the complexity of Burke’s thought as it emerges in both the major writings and private correspondence. The public and private writings cannot be easily dissociated, nor should they be. For Burke — a thinker, writer, and politician — the principles of politics were merely those of morality enlarged. Bromwich reads Burke’s career as an imperfect attempt to organize an honorable life in the dense medium he knew politics to be. The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence examines the first three decades of Burke’s professional life. His protest against the cruelties of English society and his criticism of all unchecked power laid the groundwork for his later attacks on abuses of government in India, Ireland, and France. Bromwich allows us to see the youthful skeptic, wary of a social contract based on “nature”; the theorist of love and fear in relation to “the sublime and beautiful”; the advocate of civil liberty, even in the face of civil disorder; the architect of economic reform; and the agitator for peace with America. However multiple and various Burke’s campaigns, a single-mindedness of commitment always drove him. Here is a brief excerpt.
The election of September 1780 took place against the ominous background of the riots and the fear of domestic violence to come. Yet Burke was not wrong to feel initially hopeful. Many things united him to his Bristol constituency. Among the most active of the electors were Quakers and Dissenters; and as early as 1773, he had made clear his support for religious toleration. Bristol, too, was a trading center, and he had helped the city to negotiate local advantages. Yet it was the matter of commerce that, gradually in the late 1770s, opened up a division. The Bristol merchants supported free trade when it suited their interest but were eager for protection when they saw the growing prosperity of a rival country. On the question of free trade for Ireland, Burke refused to deviate even when his support for an easing of restrictions touched the nerves and the pocketbooks of those who had helped him gain his seat.
A second contentious issue was his support for a reform to lighten the penalties for debt. Creditors at this time still had the power by law to subject debtors to indefinite confinement; the bill he spoke for would have transferred from plaintiff to judge the authority to enforce such penalties. Yet the lifting of a privilege so liable to abuse was viewed by the banking and trading interests as a threat to the whole system of property and credit. Reform of another oppressive inheritance, the penal laws against Catholics, had been part of the Rockingham program in the preceding months: a corollary for Burke (as we have seen) of the defense of toleration for Dissenters. All the new enactments might have been approved by his constituency had not “wild and savage insurrection” — in Burke’s words — “quitted the woods, and prowled about our streets in the name of reform.” In the bewildered aftermath of the riots, popular suspicions grew more heated against religious toleration. Burke’s unqualified rejection of the Protestant Association appeared to his supporters, at the very least, inexpedient: Bristol itself had suffered a riot in sympathy with Gordon. But none of these pressures moved Burke to withdraw his support for the repeal of Catholic disabilities — an issue he would rightly portray as the largest that faced the voters of Bristol in the election of 1780.
When he returned to the city, he found that arrangements for the election had gone forward without him. Politically he was now at odds with that large proportion of his Whig constituency who preferred to maintain English privileges in trade and were ready to indulge the violent will of bigots so long as the bigots were Protestant. More generally, his path to re-election was hampered by the difficulty of returning two Whigs. For this to happen again, Burke and Cruger would have to cooperate more closely than they had done in the past.
Burke’s judgment was that the Tories favored him over Cruger. (More likely they were using him as a set-off against Cruger, the Whig whose popularity they feared.) In a letter to Portland, he calculated his chances with an additional favoring circumstance: “If the Whig Merchants could make a member, I should be chosen without all doubt or controversy”; on the other hand, Cruger “carries off such a Body of the low Voters, that I concur . . . with all my friends, that it is far better for me to make no Trial at all than to be disgraced.” His opinion of Cruger (“on whose word no man has reliance” and whose “understanding is superficial”) had never been high. Yet Cruger the American had secured the people’s affections “by a diligent attendance on them, and a total Neglect of attendance in Parliament.” The Baptists and Anabaptists remained with Cruger “and ill enough affected to me.”
Burke’s temperament, as all these remarks make clear, was poorly adapted to the bustle, the low arts of bargaining, and the traffic with interested persons that are part of the vote-getting in a contested election. He looked with a touch of self-mockery at the rituals of courtship between political artists and their audience. Thus a comment in a letter to Rockingham:
Oh which of my Sins have made me live in Elections! Oh! who shall free me from the body of this Death! . . . Cruger has saved himself by an Absence of some days; and he is come fresh to action. But if he goes on in the way I saw him last Night — I would not answer for his keeping, in this weather, which rots Candidates, voters, Aldermen, and Venison. The high flavour of us all is too much. I am sick, very sick — but in two minutes I must be one of the jolliest fellows in the world. They expect something of the Kind here — and I hold out two streets, and part of the Clubs, with great Stoutness — after deliberating speeching, Mobbing, and twice dining in the morning — About ten o’Clock at Night I could not conjure up one pun or Joke, nor put any sort of tolerably acted Jollity, into my Countenance.
He hates what he has to do, but his mood is the reverse of fastidious: the writer is steeped in the scene he describes. And the “flavour” of it comes equally from the crowds in the September heat and the primed insincerity of the candidates. The satirist who composed the mordant Vindication of Natural Society is barely submerged in the veteran politician.
Burke also had a private reason for staying in the election. The for- tunes of his friend Will Burke partly depended on his incumbency. (“The news,” he reflected, “of my being totally shut out of Parliament might kill” his friend: Will had convinced himself that all his weight derived from the perception of his attachment to Edmund; and Edmund was a man of greater consequence while he represented Bristol.) It was humiliating or, in Burke’s words, “not pleasant” to come to “every new contest like a new man”; nor does he care for the disguise he has to assume as the willing servant of the people’s desires:
I have a notion that men who take an enlarged line on publick Business, and upon Grounds of some depth, and that require at every instant, the appearance of doing something, in appearance wrong, in order to do what is really and substantially right, ought not to sit for these great busy places I hope I never shall reject the principles of general publick prudence; Those which go under the description of the moral Virtue of that name; but as to the prudence of giving up the principle to the means, I confess I grow ten times more restive than ever. I shall always follow the popular humour, and endeavour to lead it to right points, at any expence of private Interest, or party Interest, which I consider as nothing in comparison — But as to leaving to the Crowd, to choose for me, what principles I ought to hold, or what Course I ought to pursue for their benefit — I had much rather, innocently and obscurely, mix with them, with the utter ruin of all my hopes, (which hopes are my all) than to betray them by learning lessons from them. They are naturally proud, tyrannical, and ignorant; bad scholars and worse Masters. I must fairly say, that what many of them have called my passions, are my principles; and I shall act just as I have done, though perhaps more systematically, if God gives me Life, and they furnish me with the situation to act in.
The passage is important and will enter into the argument of the Speech at the Bristol Guildhall Previous to the Election. It comes to a confession of the undoubted necessity and weakness of democracy, and the untenability of an independent stance by an elected representative. Placed as it is, midway in a letter to the Duke of Portland, it shows the persistence of Burke’s avowal that he never separated the principles of politics from those of morality. This goes with his belief in the authority of untaught feelings: what many “have called my passions, are my principles.” But politics as a vocation is fated to be marred by the unpredictable mixture of human materials. The argument of Burke’s Speech at the Bristol Guildhall will reduce that perception to a maxim: a true representative must serve the interests of the people even against their opinions.
But how can a statesman do this while also giving the people to understand that they are his masters? The puzzle accounts for an ambiguity in the passage above. For the contrast between doing what is in appearance wrong and what is substantially right could only matter in a constituency where elections were contested, such as London, Westminster, or Bristol. A borough controlled by a patron, as Burke’s seat from Wendover and later his seat from Malton were, presented smaller opportunities and no contradictions: the representative answered to the patron alone and the rules were well understood. In an active constituency, however, the greater prestige of the representative is matched by the demand for tactical or ostensible arguments to satisfy voters who might object to the actual tendency of his politics.6 But this should not be too much to ask. And per- haps Burke is only suggesting an honest bargain: he has cooperated with the Bristol merchants, in a limited way, on Irish trade to secure their allowance of his opposition to the American war. Yet he is also saying that the disadvantage of popular politics is that the mask is never off. For every high-minded defense of principle, he must supply a low and accessible reason. His growing aversion to the demand for such reasons may explain a transition in his thinking about India a few years later. In the Speech on Fox’s East India Bill of 1783, he will appeal to the duty of Britain toward the insulted dignity of the people of India. But the prosecution of Warren Hastings and the East India Company, from 1788 to 1794, registers the need of support from a public who prefer selfish apparent reasons. The re- form ceases to be about India; the ostensible subject changes to England. To scour the company of corruption might look like a “mission,” but it was close enough to self-interest for people to accept.
Until his final years, Burke was always a practical politician and a member of a party. In 1780, in the Speech on Economical Reform, he had gone along with the popular fondness for superficial remedies in order to guide a more profound change that the people might not have approved on its merits. This understanding made him uneasy — a feeling shared by Charles Fox, who confessed to Burke in a letter of September 17 that in order to get votes he had disclaimed all support for “any measure prejudicial to the Protestant Religion, or tending to establish Popery in this Kingdom.” There was, of course, no danger of anyone establishing popery. Fox knew that he was pandering to a base prejudice that might compromise “the great cause of Toleration.” It is revealing that he should have chosen Burke as his audience for such doubts: “Pray judge me severely and say whether I have done wrong.” As we have seen, Burke at this time was also judging himself.
