The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke

Revised Edition. Vols. I. - III. Boston : Little, Brown, & Co.

IT is interesting to know that Burke was not really accounted among the attractive orators of his day, and that people had a habit of going out of Parliament when he rose to his feet. It illustrates the Compensations of time, atoning to the literary man for the immediate superiorities of the public speaker. Fox said, that, the better a man spoke, the harder it usually was for him to compose ; and that brilliant orator now lingers only as a name, while his laborious adversary still holds his own in literature, and resumes his career in this admirable American edition.

It shows the intellectual comprehensiveness of our people, that they are ready to be taught by this great man, so resolute an opponent of our most fundamental ideas. Everything that American institutions affirm Burke denied, except the spirit of truth and faith which alone give any institutions their value. Grattan said of him, that, so great was his love for arbitrary power, he could not sleep comfortably on his pillow, unless he thought the king had a right to take it from under him. He demonstrated to his own satisfaction that it was far more congenial to the human mind to yield to the will of one ruler than of a majority, and stated it as a “ridiculous” theory, that “ twenty-four millions should prevail over two hundred thousand.” Regarding it as the very essence of property that it should be unequal, he could conceive of no safeguard for it but that it should be “out of all proportion predominant in the representation.”

Yet, so vast were his natural abilities, his acquirements, and his aims, that he is instructive even as an antagonist, and has, moreover, left much that can now be quoted on the right side of every great question. If he can also be quoted on the other side, no matter. For instance, Buckle claims for him, that “he insisted on an obedience to the popular wishes which no man before him had paid, and which too many statesmen since him have forgotten.” Yet Burke himself boasted, at the time of his separation from Fox, that he was “the first man who, on the hustings, at a popular election, rejected the authority of instructions from constituents, or who in any place has argued so fully against it”