236 Chapter X
an altercation on the floor of the House with Pitt. Pitt declared that the American
war had been due to defective representation in Parliament. Burke hotly denied
this, and a general hubbub followed, with “some of the young members vociferat-
ing so loudly as to prevent Mr. Burke from being distinctly heard.” Burke tried
repeatedly to launch into a connected discourse, saying that he had “something to
say which he conceived to be well worth their hearing,” but finally gave up under
the clamor that he said “oppressed” him. An undelivered speech, found at his death
among his papers, is probably what he conceived to be worth the members’ hearing
on June 16, 1784. Had they listened, they would have heard no discussion of the
terms of any particular reform bill, but a beautifully compact statement of what
was to become philosophical conservatism.^34
Burke, in this speech to which no one would listen, attributed the demand for
electoral reform to a theory—the false theory of “the supposed rights of man.”
“They lay it down that every man ought to govern himself, and that where he can-
not go, himself, he must send his representative; that all other government is usur-
pation.... Nine tenths of the reformers argue thus—that is, on the natural right.”
(He had himself justified the claims of Irish Catholics by natural right.) But, he
now said, the British constitution did not derive its authority from any such source
as natural right, nor did the Commons represent men as men, “as a collection of
individuals.” The constitution rested on prescription. (I have shown how Bishop
Warburton had appealed to prescription, as a barrier to natural right, in defending
the Test Act.) “Our constitution is a prescriptive constitution; it is a constitution
whose sole authority is, that it has existed time out of mind.” Prescription was a
better source of rightful authority than election, because prescription showed the
real “choice of the nation.” This, he said, anticipating a famous passage in the Re-
flections on the French Revolution, where society was called a contract between the
dead, the living and the yet unborn, was because “a nation is not an idea only of
local extent and individual momentary aggregation.... [The nation’s choice, as
shown by prescription,] is a deliberate choice of ages and generations; it is a con-
stitution made by what is ten thousand times better than choice; it is made by pe-
culiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and moral, civil and social
habitudes of the people, which disclose themselves only in a long space of time.”
Here the question was how the real will of a political community could be as-
certained. For Rousseau, as for Genevese democrats, or the authors of the Ameri-
can constitutions, this will must be felt and exercised by living persons in the pres-
ent. For Burke the real will could be observed at work only over a long period of
34 Parliamentary History, X XIV, 1,001. The refusal to give Burke a hearing was not due to pressure
of time, since twelve speeches by others followed. Burke, Writings, VII, 89–104, “Speech on a mo-
tion... to inquire into the state of the representation of the Commons in Parliament.” Some of
Burke’s editors, including the editor of the Boston edition of 1901, here cited, attribute this speech, or
intended speech, to May 17, 1782, others to June 16, 1784. I have chosen the latter date because of the
incident reported in the parliamentary history for that day, and because it seems likely that Burke
would have codified his opposition to reform on the occasion of the third recently attempted reform
bill rather than of that of 1782. It would be worth while to attempt an exact dating of this speech from
Burke’s unpublished papers. If written in 1784, this important statement of Burke’s position would be
influenced by events in Ireland also, and perhaps by speeches in the Irish Parliament in 1783, quoted
above, since Burke was in close correspondence with Ireland.