Two Parliaments Escape Reform 237
time. The two views were not necessarily contradictory, nor should either be dis-
missed as false, but they would coincide only in a relatively unchanging society, or
in one not conscious or desirous of political change. One view was calculated to
justify change and assert liberty. Burke’s view was designed to resist change, and to
confine liberty within the limits of such liberties, if any, as might be inherited.
Burke’s view represented also a distrust of the reason of consciously reasoning, liv-
ing men. “The individual is foolish, the multitude is foolish, but the species is
wise.”
As for the House of Commons, he went on, it too existed prescriptively. It had
always been the same, composed of knights, citizens, and burgesses, representing
not persons or individuals, but the corporate units of shires, cities, and boroughs
without regard to population. No change was necessary in the recruitment of the
House, and certainly no conversion to a radically new system of personal represen-
tation, because, on a practical ground, no change could be expected to do anyone
any good. England had long been free, happy, and prosperous with its Parliament.
Indeed, rightly understood, England already enjoyed equal representation. “You
have an equal representation because you have men equally interested in the pros-
perity of the whole.” If thirty- six sat for Cornwall, and only six for Lancashire, it
made no difference. The truth that may be found in this particular allegation is that
the thirty- six Cornish members certainly did not represent Cornwall, and that the
Manchester industrialists, or Yorkshire landowners, as I have said, did not, or did
not yet, feel much material disadvantage from political underrepresentation.
With that disproportion already noted, Burke proceeded to identify a few pro-
posed changes in the electoral system with violation of the order of nature, or of
God’s plan for the government of the world. “There is an order that keeps things
fast in their place: it is made to us, and we are made to it. Why not ask another
wife, other children, another body, another mind?” (Or as Sir Hercules said in Ire-
land: “Good God! Is the mind of man never to be satisfied!”) And he proceeded to
identify electoral changes with total subversion: “The great object of most of these
reformers is to prepare the destruction of the Constitution by disgracing and dis-
crediting the House of Commons.” And to declare that only what existed was
possible, and that to criticize government was to invite anarchy. “For to discredit
the only form of government which we either possess or can project, what is this
but to destroy all government? And this is anarchy.” And to conclude with an ar-
resting image: he would never abuse the constitution of his country, he would
never “cut it in pieces, and put it in the kettle of any magician, in order to boil it,
with the puddle of their compounds, into youth and vigor.”^35
Much could be said on the philosophical implications of this speech, as, for ex-
ample, that the offering of no alternative except stark chaos made him a kind of
Hobbesian of the unreformed Parliament, or that the identification of the real, the
right, the rational, and the possible made him a kind of predecessor to Hegel.
35 All quotations in the preceding three paragraphs may be found within the fifteen pages of the
speech cited. On Burke’s “order that keeps things fast in their place,” compare the Parlement of Paris
in 1776, appealing, to oppose Turgot’s reform of the corvée, to an order that “takes its source in divine
institutions... a law of the Universe which despite efforts of the human mind... etc.” See below, pp.
334–35.