234 Chapter X
firmed and supported that there has been generally something found amiss in the
constitution or the conduct of government.”^22 He never said as much of any later
discontents, however “prevalent,” in England or elsewhere, in which his own sym-
pathies or party loyalties were not aroused. He could call the non- representation of
Manchester one of “the shameful parts of our constitution”—when he was defend-
ing the Americans against Lord North in 1774.^23 He saw nothing disconcerting in
it on other occasions. He could coin the very formula of the impatient progressive:
“There is a time when men will not suffer bad things because their ancestors have
suffered worse.”^24 He made this remark in arguing for his Economic Reform.
What we miss is the ability to perceive, in an objective way, the relevancy of such
maxims to the ideas of other men.
There was one context in which he was willing to argue from an elevated posi-
tion, to appeal to that “great rule of equality, which is grounded upon our common
nature,” that natural law or “substance of original justice” of which all human laws
were only declaratory.^25 There was one context in which he could freely affirm that
no one should be excluded from the commonwealth, that if excluded they might
turn revolutionary or subversive, that without some degree of equality men could
not be fellow citizens, that the whole empire should have “one common bottom of
equality and justice.”^26 Such phases might apply to the whole reforming and revo-
lutionary movement of his day, to the whole dissatisfaction with self- enclosed gov-
erning bodies, and to the whole principle of the democratic state as it developed in
later times. He applied them in the context of Irish Catholic disabilities.
Burke was never conservative abstractly or obstinately or dogmatically, from a
mere principle of conservatism as a value in itself. Even in the Reflections on the
French Revolution he allowed for a right of revolution; his objection to the French
was that they needed no revolution, that they had made “an unforced choice, a
fond election of evil.”^27 This objection rested in turn on the judgment, or feeling,
that French government and society before 1789 were, on balance, good. His ap-
proval of France before 1789 is apparent in many of his speeches and writings, as
when he offered the federalism of the French provinces as a model for the British
empire, or again, in 1780, pointed to the current reforms of Necker as an example
of the economic reform that he desired in England.
22 Ibid., I, 439, 441. “Thoughts on the cause of the present discontents,” 1770.
23 Ibid., II, 74. “Speech on American taxation,” 1774.
24 Ibid., II, 279. “Speech on a plan for better security of the independence of Parliament,” 1780.
25 Ibid., VII, 326. “Fragments of a tract relative to the laws against popery in Ireland,” about 1765.
26 Letter to Dermott, Aug. 17, 1779, in Burke correspondence, I, 813, in Wentworth- Woodhouse
manuscripts at Sheffield; Writings, IV, 220, “Letter to a peer of Ireland on the penal laws against
Catholics,” 1782; and various utterances in the 1790’s, Ibid., IV, 292, VII, 369, 379, 398, 423, where
he now rejects natural right as a ground for granting the franchise to otherwise qualified Catholics and
argues that they must be given a share in the constitution and a sense of participation and citizenship
lest they turn Jacobin, i.e., revolutionary.
27 On the right of revolution, Ibid., III, 410. “Reflections,” 1790: “I do admit that too critical an
inquiry might not be advisable into the means of freeing the world.... The tenderest minds, con-
founded with the dreadful exigence in which morality submits to the suspension of its own rules in
favor of its own principles, might turn aside whilst fraud and violence were accomplishing the destruc-
tion of a pretended nobility... .” The Jacobins would not have put it otherwise.