Two Parliaments Escape Reform 235
Burke’s conservative sentiments, like his liberal ones, arose in a concrete and
human way from strong emotions. As he was powerfully held by the vision of a
great British empire, or by the plight of the Irish Catholics, so he had a profound
feeling for English society and for the British constitution and Parliament. And
the same disproportion between far- reaching generalizations and the specific is-
sues to which they applied, a disproportion that we have just observed in his liberal
sentiments, is to be found in even greater measure in his conservative ones. He
could call up the image of a great and just commonwealth of equal citizens to ob-
tain the vote for a handful of Irish Catholic freeholders. He could invoke pictures
of wholesale desolation in arguing against very limited proposals for change. It is a
disproportion that suggests an emotional origin, but also, in all candor, a taste for
rhetoric in the grand manner, the habits of a highly articulate man of letters in
politics.
A few examples:
It is proposed (in 1769) to enlarge the electorate. But if people get the idea that
“our constitution is not so perfect as it ought to be” the authority of Parliament is
undermined, and ruin follows.^28 It is proposed to relieve certain Anglican clergy-
men of subscription to the Thirty- Nine Articles. This must not be done. Why not?
Because the Anglican clergy must accept the doctrines made legal by Parliament,
“because dissent, not satisfied with toleration, is not conscience, but ambition,” and
because “no legislature was ever so absurd as to tax its people to support men for
teaching and acting as they please.”^29 Infidels are bad. Why? Because they are “out-
laws of the constitution of the human race.”^30 Taxation of Irish absentee landown-
ers would be bad. Why? Because it would subvert the principle of common citi-
zenship in the empire.^31 He calls up a dreadful vision of lawsuits, litigations,
prosecutions, frenzy, of “society dissolved, industry interrupted, ruined—of those
personal hatreds that will never be suffered to soften, those animosities and feuds
which will be rendered immortal, those quarrels which are never to be appeased—
morals vitiated and gangrened in the vitals.”^32 What has occasioned this horrifying
prognostication? Is it the Reign of Terror in France? No, it is a proposal that Par-
liament be elected every three years instead of every seven. Similarly, as a land-
owner of Buckinghamshire, he wrote to his county meeting, at the time of the
Association movement, that the plan to add a hundred county members to the
Commons would alter the “constitution of Parliament itself.”^33
When electoral reform became an issue of practical politics, sponsored four
times in close succession by men in responsible office, Burke prepared a speech in
which he assembled his arguments against it. This speech was never delivered, for
the good reason that no one would listen to it. At the time of Pitt’s reform bill of
1783 Burke rose to speak, but declined to do so because so many members were
walking out. In the following year, at the time of Sawbridge’s bill, Burke got into
28 Ibid., I, 371. “Observations on a late publication... ,” 1769.
29 Ibid., VII, 11, 13. “Speech on the Acts of Uniformity,” 1772.
30 Ibid., VII, 36. “Speech on a bill for the relief of Protestant Dissenters,” 1773.
31 Ibid., VII, 121–34. “A letter... on the Irish absentee tax,” 1773.
32 Ibid., VII, 80. “Speech on a bill for shortening the duration of Parliaments,” 1780.
33 Ibid., VII, 293. “Letter to the chairman of the Buckinghamshire meeting,” 1780.