The Legend of Edmund Burke
Sarason, Bertram
In the hope of exorcising the fears of their liberal readers (perhaps the most anxious readers they have) that Conservatism is little more than a revival of crude reaction, the New Conservatives...
...Every strike was confronted with a detachment of troops, and all efforts at increasing wages or at lowering prices were denominated "Seditious Proceedings...
...The most important spokesman for property rights in that day was Edmund Burke, the hero and inspiration for the modern Conservatives...
...In 1795, when the era of shortages and high prices finally resulted in a deep depression, proposals were made for Pitt's government to undertake some program of aid to the agrarian workers...
...The strategem towards which he worked was to represent the situation as one in which equal and conflicting claims subsisted...
...The real past, then, not the past of the Conservative Imagination, was one in which the essential principle of humaneness was flouted...
...But this version of the Conservative tradition and of the role of Conservatism's founding father will not stand historical scrutiny...
...In Burke's time the apparent target of government, prosecution was a group of men who wished to extend suffrage and to repeal the Test Acts, which were unfair to those outside the Church of England...
...Mr...
...The kindness of Sir Owen Morshead made it possible for me to see certain papers among the Royal Achives, and the generosity of Earl Fitzwilliam to use unpiblished Burke materials at Lamport and Sheffield, where i also received necessary permissions and kind assistance from the librarians at those places...
...Thus Mr...
...but he might have added, had he known the New Conservatives, that those infatuated with the past are given to glossing over its iniquities...
...Kirk often thinks of those evils...
...By and large, these men were not "dangerous radicals" and they have been cleared by most historians of the charge of subversion, in the good old-fashioned sense of the word...
...Indeed, a critical reader will be inclined to consider such professions more as apologetics than as tenets of a creed...
...For that matter, we need go no farther than the founder of modern Conservatism, Edmund Burke himself, to show that the historic role of conservatism has been to defend vested interests...
...These were the principles that gave impetus to the spread of civil liberties and that elevated human rights above property rights...
...Reform societies thanked Burke for the discussion he provoked and especially for his occasioning Paine's great reply...
...and the assaults in which he partook on civil liberties are transmuted into acts of righteousness...
...To clinch his argument, Burke maintained, in the facile rhetoric historically characteristic of the Conservative, that the laws of Commerce were the laws of Nature, that the laws of Nature were the laws of God, and that by so much as disturbing the everyday flow of business an iota, one ran counter to the Divine Will...
...Almost immediately after the publication of his Reflections on November 1, 1789, we find him on friendly terms with his former bitterest enemies, with Dundas, Pitt's right hand, and with George III...
...On June 5, 1794: 300 pounds for the internal defense of the kingdom...
...Two weeks after Bastille Day the Home Office—the then equivalent of the FBI—was investigating an anonymous letter received by the Lord Mayor of London which threatened to burn down the Albion Mills unless the price of bread was reduced...
...If Let us take, as an example, the era of the French Revolution...
...To say, as has been said, that Burke proved useful to government and to those uneasy classes who looked to government for protection in somewhat the same way as McCarthy served a vicarious purpose, is not to suggest for a moment that we are speaking of men of comparable culture or depth...
...Burke supported the persecutions of the Pitt administration, which were generally directed against certain "liberals", most of them sympathetic to the French Revolution...
...At the same time Burke is exonerated and even apotheosized into a clairvoyant who foresaw the century of Stalinism...
...Conservative admirers of Burke claim extenuating circumstances...
...Kirk devotes the introductory chapter of his book not merely to the glorious past but to the glories of Burke...
...Kirk in the opening chapter of The Conservative Mind is of a Golden Age existing before the rise of a barbarous Democracy...
...And Mr...
...of the dearness of...
...Here we have one of the formidable legends of the New Conservatives...
...In this Arcadia many salutary and moderate influences were supposedly at work...
...Burke's functions, as the administration saw them, were to stir up public opinion for so-called "security measures" and to divert the attention of critics from the administration to Burke himself—a function which McCarthy performed admirably for a while...
...When Burke produced the famous dagger of Dr...
...This is a decision with which few of us will agree...
...in fact, he was permitted to believe that he was leading the administration in the entire project...
...On December 12, 1793: over 26I 100 pounds for the purchase of a new organ for St...
...Even if Burke received a good deal more credit—or blame—than he actually deserved, his complicity cannot be denied...
...That event was the grand pretext used by English politicians for defending vested interests and for curbing civil liberties because those liberties conflicted with property rights...
...Turn to Burke if you wish to under stand the twentieth century, Mr...
...He thought the ship of state was being overburdened on the Left, for which reason, as he said in the final lines of the Reflections, he wished to preserve equipoise by adding the weight of his arguments to the other side...
...A member of the nobility, writing to the Home Office on November 7, 1792, summed up the fears of the administration in his own report on conditions in North Wales: "The Miners are about 2,000 in number Sc being a loose body of Men will be the objects of the addresses of Mr...
...In other words, government, the agency of justice, was not to intervene...
...In the hope of exorcising the fears of their liberal readers (perhaps the most anxious readers they have) that Conservatism is little more than a revival of crude reaction, the New Conservatives have had to give certain intellectual assurances...
...Conservatism did not originate with Burke—it was already a commonplace in his day—and those classes whose ideological property it was needed no rhapsodic rendering, such as Burke gave it, to make that "philosophy" acceptable to them, especially during the 1790's...
...The question has never been satisfactorily answered...
...and the decision to help the poor was to be left entirely to the employers whose rapacity was the crux of the problem from the beginning...
...But even before July 1791, Tom Paine was being spied on, inasmuch as his book was being read by the poorer classes, and Colonel De Lancey was sent on a special mission to determine the spread of Paine's ideas—and those of other reformers—among the troops...
...But on August 20, in response to a letter from one of the local Magistrates, three troops of dragoons were sent for reinforcement...
...Burke, of course, was a man of great abilities, and he was, in his way, a genius—or rather, he had a genius for expression...
...Of course there was no foundation to Burke's charges that •the administration was lax...
...Much of the research incorporated in this essay was done in connection with the grant during 1954-1955 from the Fund for the Advancement of Education...
...The annals of an era are summarized in the records of the city of Lincoln...
...These are, as one might expect, gestures of reverence for civil liberties and an abhorrence of the malpractices of orthodox capitalism...
...Other testimony is to be found in the literature of the period which exploited Burke's nasty remark in the Reflections about the "swinish multitude...
...They serve to remind us of history in all its harsh reality, a narrative telling of encroachments on freedom and cruelties to the poor...
...Students of Marx and Tawney need no elaborate investigation to demonstrate the role played by the ecclesiasts in rationalizing the interests of the propertied classes...
...London, 1844), from the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, from the Northampton Records Office, Lamport, England, and from the Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments on deposit at the Central Library, Sheffield, England...
...He summons before us a world in which there flourished, under the prevalence of Conservative principles, an awe of tradition and a cautiousness about change, which he sees as the sum of political virtue...
...As a result, we are led to believe, property rights rarely, if ever, prevailed over human rights, while the ideals of politics guaranteed civil liberties for all...
...Crane Brinton tells us that the quarrel between Burke and Paine is now over, and Burke is the decided victor...
...To trace the genesis of Conservatism in historical context and in Burke's career does not necessarily impugn the doctrine itself, although a retrospective view will help us see Conservatism in a less mysterious and sanctified light than some people are willing to see it...
...It was only when Burke learned that Dr...
...As a result of De Lancey's investigations, troops were removed from many sensitive spots, and new barracks were built at a distance from so-called corrupted cities...
...But it was not until January 1790, by which time the French Revolution was six months old and its course, at least its abolition of the ancien regime, was clearly defined, that Burke first focused his fears upon specific persons at home...
...Kirk as the most "lucid retort" of the defenders of free enterprise, but in no way denounced by him as embodying the very laissez faire economics he supposedly abominates...
...On August 4 a reply was forthcoming to the effect that a local investigator might be more effective and that the troops stationed at Wrexham seemed sufficient for the present needs...
...Price and Tom Paine, Priestley enjoyed a position of eminence among the dangerous "radicals" whom Burke shortly thereafter condemned...
...It is an essay which would have warmed the heart of Herbert Hoover, an essay dramatically described by Mr...
...According to the daughter of a government spy, certain miners had united "under the pretension...
...Why then were they persecuted...
...It illustrates too that political theory can be shot through and through with religion—as modern Conservatism is indeed pietistic— without precluding the grossest kind of inhumanity...
...It is not unlikely, however, that both men had their interested motives and were blind, in turn, to the existence of those motives...
...the Pitt administration found him extremely useful...
...Russell Kirk, another leader of the conservative intellectuals, will have no part of laissez-faire economics...
...The day before, the High Sheriff of the County of Denbigh and Justices of the Peace of Wrexham warned the Home Office of "repeated and alarming disturbances among the Colliers and others occasioned by the advanced price of Corn...
...Along with Dr...
...As a matter of policy, the government had to conceal its activities, the litigations being drawn up, and the vast network of spies and informers surreptitiously at work...
...Behind the anxiety about the French Revolution and about the reformers, whose program was, after all, quite moderate, there was a fear that the demands of the people might inconvenience the propertied classes...
...It was under these circumstances that Burke wrote his fragmentary essay, Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, in the hope of dissuading Pitt from coming to the aid of the distressed...
...They worked in mines, the witness said, where they were "chained, belted, harnessed like dogs in a go-cart, black, saturated with wet, and more than half naked—crawling upon their hands and feet, and dragging their heavy loads behind them...
...Peter Viereck dissociates himself from McCarthyism, and Mr...
...Crane Brinton, as contemporary as this morning's paper...
...Three months before the French Revolution got under way, the Lord President of the Privy Council was notified by several persons "of the riotous proceedings . . . at the Coal Pits" in Northumberland...
...Paine's disciples...
...By stressing this analogy, the Conservatives convert all French sympathizers into "Reds" —what we might call the "retrospective Red-baiting of liberals...
...Much of the research incity of Lincoln comes from the Histori-corporated in this essay was done incal Manuscripts Commission, Lincoln Mss., connection with a grant during 1954XIV Report, Appendix VIII, p. 119...
...On December 17, 1792: a sum not exceeding 20 pounds for checking the spirit of the disaffected...
...But this is the very tradition which the New Conservatives reject...
...At this very time an owner of the Albion Mills was inviting the attention of the Home Office to additional dangers...
...Public prints, such as The World, were circulating "most dangerous and inflammatory" matter—e.g., a paragraph entitled "Bread for Extortion...
...So much for the civil liberties aspect of the Conservative past...
...A few more qualifications of that sort and the New Conservatism will become indistinguishable from Liberalism itself...
...It will remind us, if a reminder were needed, that the historic role of Conservativism, no matter what its intellectual adornments, has been to defend the status quo by rationalizing its injustice, by creating a false atmosphere of hysteria, and by using an illusory past to distract attention from the evils of the present...
...to leave the rich without obligation for the poor was to work the injustice the other way...
...At any rate, the proposed projects called for the prevention of runaway prices and for augmented purchasing power...
...and without laissez faire economics or McCarthyism But of course, no such past ever existed...
...Consequently, when the Conservatives call for a return to tradition, they mean one of their own devising, a past which has been carefully purged of all embarrassing actuality...
...263...
...For, certainly, this is not the Conservatism we have known in the past...
...But Burke, the secretly paid political advisor of the wealthy Rockinghams and Fitzwilliams, was actually a rigid defender of property rights and a leader, certainly the most outspoken leader, in an assault on freedom of speech, assembly, and publication in the turbulent 1790's...
...Viereck advises...
...Detailed reports of the French Revolution from the English ambassador at Paris showed that at the very outset two causes destroyed the power of the French government to maintain orderly rule...
...Speaking of the past, Santayana said that those who are ignorant of it are destined to repeat its errors...
...Corn & that they must have their Wages raised...
...Burke, conceding that the plight of the poor deserved attention, also contended that the employers had rights that ought not be overlooked...
...Maxwell—one of thousands being manufactured for the French, he told the House of Commons—he made it appear that the dagger was his discovery...
...they are instigated by ill-disposed people & there are even some among them that utter something about the French & others doing the same...
...It was by such arguments that property rights were given preference to human rights...
...It had been given to him by one of Pitt's secretaries precisely for the purpose of putting Burke in the forefront while, behind the scenes, the government was conducting a general investigation of munitions orders and was tracking down rumors that Irish agents were supplying the French with arms...
...It took no Edmund Burke to warn Pitt and his administration of the possibility of similar threats to England, although the possibility of a consequent revolution was largely theoretical...
...IY Burke himself, very much like the New Conservatives, often insisted that he was fundamentally liberal, that his attack on the French Revolution, as well as his refusal to support the reforms under consideration in the 1790's, was justified by the needs of the times...
...The French Revolution itself was looked upon in a similar light...
...Then, employing a device of the theologian Suarez, Burke said that the question could not be resolved by justice: the problem was one known as appealing to "the order of charity...
...Burke's was no lonely position when he became, to use Matthew Arnold's words, the spokesman for an epoch of concentration...
...Priestley...
...Their very marked differences may make it distasteful to us, and even repugnant for the mind to conceive, that there were, after all, some striking traits in common between the two: though dragged to such conclusions we cannot embrace them...
...The quotation on child labor is Archives, and the generosity of Earltaken from J. L. and Barbara Ham-Fitzwilliam to use unpublished Burkemond's The Town Labourer, 1760-1832...
...They say that these "liberals" who were spied on, informed on, brought to trial, jailed, and even shipped to Botany Bay were very much like the Communists of this era...
...He is, says Mr...
...Pamphlets like A Salmagundy for Swine or Hog's Wash were common during the 1790's...
...materials at Lamport and Sheffield, whereit was called to my attention in a review I also received necessary permissions andof that book in the Times Literary kind assistance from the librarians at Supplement, August 8, 1953...
...An idyllic world indeed...
...The class whose pocketbook would be affected would be that of the wealthy landowners, the Fitzwilliams and others whom Burke served...
...Priestley's friends would not support his party in the forthcoming elections—he found this out one evening in early January 1790—that he broke with the "reformers" and made the attack on the French Revolution, to which they were sympathetic, the mission of his existence...
...The reports of the ments on deposit at the Central Library, Duke of Dorset derived from the Foreign Sheffield, England...
...The government was on the alert hereafter to quell strikes by force and to scotch disaffection in the army...
...SOURCES...
...Prior to then, in September and October 1789, Burke was eager to gain the voting power of the "reformers," and he wrote, once to Fox and once indirectly to the Prince of Wales, urging them to accommodate a request of Dr...
...One idea was to establish an official granary, another plan to increase wages...
...Rationalizing his chagrin as a "threat from the Left," Burke joined forces with others whose equanimity was being shaken, with the High Churchmen who had disturbing visions of lost tithes, with those close to the Court who believed all monarchy in danger, and with the propertied classes whose status was threatened by the concurrence of strikes and the influx of democratic ideas...
...For the author of The Conservative Mind, Burke holds all the solutions for the evils of our time—the great prophet of the ills of Democracy, as Mr...
...More serious was proof he offered from James Beech of the Coldstream Guards that "100 men of his Regiment were determined not to fire upon any mob that might attack the Albion Mills—That he had heard them say so— That there were upwards of 11,000 sacks of Flour at the Mills at a time when people were wanting Bread...
...It was added earnestly, that "their views do not seem to be confined to the pretended object," and the government was urged to send down an investigator as well as troops...
...III Edmund Burke played an important role in mobilizing public opinion for the witch hunts that were deemed necessary...
...The kindness of SirOffice reports (from FO 27.30 onwards) Owen Morshead made it possible for mealso on deposit in the Public Records to see certain papers among the RoyalOffice...
...The Church tempered the power of the State, and pious theories of Natural Law provided a basis for secular justice...
...The second cause was the disaffection of -the soldiers, many of whom, having imbibed democratic ideas from America, were unwilling to fire on their own fellow citizens when called upon to do so...
...The picture painted by Mr...
...Indeed, the strategy of the Conservatives, in their quest for support, is to appeal to the intellectuals by accommodating anti-Stalinism to a philosophy of tradition...
...The advocates for Parliamentary Reform and for the repeal of the Test Acts were regarded as inciting the working classes, and the crime of such - reformers was not their specific acts but the suggestiveness of their language—not what they did but their possible influence...
...The Conservative, looking fondly back to the age of Burke, is never likely to uncover this kind of vignette, part of a contemporary report about the life of children of both sexes, some of them no more than five years old...
...1955 from the Fund for the AdvanceMaterials on Burke were drawn from the ment of Education...
...On December 22, 1794—it being just before Christmas: "Fourty guineas for the poor during the present inclemency of the season...
...Data on the those places...
...To help the poor meant to rob the rich...
...True, the height of vigilance was not reached until the Birmingham Riots of July 1791, because they were a prelude for strikes throughout England for the next two years...
...Burke is made out as having saved his country, by an early warning, from one vast Jacobin plot, about the same as the Communist conspiracy...
...In the mind of the public he was the arch reactionary of the day, as Pitt must have hoped he would become...
...Burke was willing to cooperate...
...It will serve, however, to point the direction in which the sympathies of the New Conservatives lie...
...Burke's Thoughts and Details is pertinent here because it illustrates the perverse uses to which an appeal to Natural Law can be put...
...And if these evils have been abolished in most countries today, it is not owing to "the order of charity" or to Natural Law or to any Conservative concept as such but rather to the passion for justice made explicit by the French Revolution and summarized in the idea of the Rights of Man...
...The first was the recurrent uprisings, not only in Paris, but throughout the provinces, in protest against the scarcity of grain and against the high price of bread...
...It is now appropriate to see just how far the "communion of Church and State" effected a tempering of power and just how far the old doctrines of Natural Law prevented property rights from superseding human rights: to examine, in other words, just how much truth there is—if we appeal to experience, as the New Conservatives say we should—in their own favorite doctrines...
...For conditions in England don, 1844) , from the Royal Archives atduring the 1790's the records of the Windsor Castle, from the NorthamptonHome Office (from H042.13 onwards) in Records Office, Lamport, England, andthe Public Records Office, London were from the Wentworth Woodhouse Munia valuable source...
...Peter's Church...
...standard Correspondence, 4 Vols...
Vol. 2 • July 1955 • No. 3
