hleteers of
the day made selections from the speeches and tracts of his happier
time, and the seeming contrast had its effect. More candid opponents
admitted then, as all competent persons admit now, that the
inconsistency was merely verbal and superficial. Watson, the Bishop of
Llandaff, was only one of many who observed very early that this was
the unmistakable temper of Burke's mind. "I admired, as everybody
did," he said, "the talents, but not the principles of Mr. Burke; his
opposition to the Clerical Petition [for relaxation of subscription,
1772], first excited my suspicion of his being a High Churchman in
religion, and a Tory, perhaps an aristocratic Tory, in the state."
Burke had indeed never been anything else than a conservative. He was
like Falkland, who had bitterly assailed Strafford and Finch on the
same principles on which, after the outbreak of the civil war, he
consented to be secretary of state to King Charles. Coleridge is borne
out by a hundred passages, when he says that in Burke's writings at
the beginning of the American Revolution and in those at the beginning
of the French Revolution, the principles are the same and the
deductions are the same; the practical inferences are almost opposite
in the one case from those drawn in the other, yet in both equally
legitimate. It would be better to say that they would have been
equally legitimate, if Burke had been as right in his facts, and as
ample in his knowledge in the case of France, as he was in the case of
America. We feel, indeed, that partly from want of this knowledge, he
has gone too far from some of the wise maxims of an earlier time.
What has become of the doctrine that all great public collections of
men--he was then speaking of the House of Commons--"possess a marked
love of virtue and an abhorrence of vice."[1] Why was the French
Assembly not to have the benefit of this admirable generalisation?
What has become of all those sayings about the presumption, in all
disputes between nations and rulers, "being at least upon a par in
favour of the people;" and a populace never rebelling from passion for
attack, but from impatience of suffering? And where is now that strong
dictum, in the letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, that "general
rebellions and revolts of a whole people never were _encouraged_, now
or at any time; they are always _provoked_"?

[Footnote 1: _American Taxation_.]

When all these things have been noted, to hold a man to his