Not long ago, the youngest of the Three Sisters found a copy of the Selected Prose of Edmund Burke in a used book shop we visit a couple of times of year in county Victoria. She remembered the name from her French Revolution class of her secondary college days. What she noticed, what captured her vision, was the cover to the left. I think that Burke, the author of A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, would have been pleased at this.I am interested in what is inside the covers of this book that was edited and introduced by Sir Philip Magnus and published by the Falcon Press in 1948. Given the post-war economy, the quality of the work is amazing in terms of stitching and paper, as well as print quality. But, it is the writing that is truly wonderful. Few Americans today realise what effect Burke had on the writing and early interpretation of the United States Constitution mentioned in the previous post. Few Catholics realise how much they owe to Burke.
I'll shortly reproduce a portion of his Letter on Catholic Emancipation which was dated 29 January 1795 and written to William Smith, Esquire, who was a member of the Irish Parliament. Before doing so, I will say two things. First, Sir Walter Scott and Robbie Burns were Jacobites and not Jacobins. Typical readers of Dan Brown novels are likely to get this confused. Also, they are likely to think that Thomas Paine was brilliant. He was not a patch on Burke. In fact, Burkean sentiment in the United States during this period was much higher than any support for Paine who was actually run out of the country.
It has only been in these latter years that Paine's star has risen in the celestial canopy of some Americans for reasons that both Burke and De Tocqueville both preciently perceived. Burke would probably quip that this has more to do with the earth bound nature of the canopy held aloft by Brownites rather than the loftiness of the Star of Paine which should be forever bound to the early motto of the Jacobins: liberte, equalite, fraternite ou la mort.
Now, the Jacobins were also not of Patrick Henry's mind. His pronouncement of "give me liberty or give me death" had to do with his willingness to die in the fight for freedom. For the Jacobins, it had to do with the death of others whose opinions differ from the party line and the destruction of a society ordered on something more than the most recent mewling of a brains trust controlled by the political tyrants of the moment, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth discovered to their horror during the Reign of Terror.
Readers of Dan Brown may well misunderstand Burke's use of the terms "prejudice" and "prescription", as well. The first may well be thought of by them as something one should avoid admitting to having at all costs in order to be politically correct; it's all the fashion you know. And, the second would probably be thought to refer to that which should be obtained at all costs to ensure one is able to live long and be banal; not for them a single "crowded hour" of real life. Here is the quote from Sir Walter Scott's, Count Robert of Paris, page 296 (remember, Scott is a Jacobite, not a Jacobin):
One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honour or observation.
To see what I mean, spend some time reading Bourke's prosecution of Warren Hastings to get an idea of the unrelenting nature of his commitment to justice before the law. You will also see the international scope of his concern for responsible action.
My second thought has been this. I am not that far removed from Burke in either temperment or time. With regards to time, it came as a shock to realise our relative closeness. My great-grandfather, Frederick Albert Bulman (FAB) died about the time I was seven. His grandmother, Sarah Vale Bulman (SVB) may have died when was six. She was born in either 1794 or 1795, supposedly in Holland. By then, many of the Dutch were more than willing to take the risks involved with crossing the seas and setting out as pioneers. They preferred this to becoming fuel for the fire-storm of Europe.
She may have been a short distance away from Burke when he wrote his important letters regarding the freedom of Catholics after the French Terror. In fact, if she really were born in Holland in 1794 rather than in America of Dutch parents, then their ship might well have left for the United States from an English port.
In any case, I knew FAB and he knew SVB. She was born in the time of Burke. Yet, we have all known Burke's influence more or less proximately for the last two hundred years. When that light fades from our imaginations, God help us.
A selection from a Letter to William Smith, in Ireland, follows. An online version of the whole can be found here:
My whole politics, at present, centre in one point, and to this the merit or demerit of every measure (with me) is referable,—that is, what will most promote or depress the cause of Jacobinism. What is Jacobinism? It is an attempt (hitherto but too successful) to eradicate prejudice out of the minds of men, for the purpose of putting all power and authority into the hands of the persons capable of occasionally enlightening the minds of the people. For this purpose the Jacobins have resolved to destroy the whole frame and fabric of the old societies of the world, and to regenerate them after their fashion. To obtain an army for this purpose, they everywhere engage the poor by holding out to them as a bribe the spoils of the rich. This I take to be a fair description of the principles and leading maxims of the enlightened of our day who are commonly called Jacobins.
As the grand prejudice, and that which holds all the other prejudices together, the first, last, and middle object of their hostility is religion. With that they are at inexpiable war. They make no distinction of sects. A Christian, as such, is to them an enemy. What, then, is left to a real Christian, (Christian as a believer and as a statesman,) but to make a league between all the grand divisions of that name, to protect and to cherish them all, and by no means to proscribe in any manner, more or less, any member of our common party? The divisions which formerly prevailed in the Church, with all their overdone zeal, only purified and ventilated our common faith, because there was no common enemy arrayed and embattled to take advantage of their dissensions; but now nothing but inevitable ruin will be the consequence of our quarrels. I think we may dispute, rail, persecute, and provoke the Catholics out of their prejudices; but it is not in ours they will take refuge. If anything is, one more than another, out of the power of man, it is to create a prejudice. Somebody has said, that a king may make a nobleman, but he cannot make a gentleman.
All the principal religions in Europe stand upon one common bottom. The support that the whole or the favored parts may have in the secret dispensations of Providence it is impossible to tell; but, humanly speaking, they are all prescriptive religions. They have all stood long enough to make prescription and its chain of legitimate prejudices their main stay. The people who compose the four grand divisions of Christianity have now their religion as an habit, and upon authority, and not on disputation,—as all men who have their religion derived from their parents and the fruits of education must have it, however the one more than the other may be able to reconcile his faith to his own reason or to that of other men. Depend upon it, they must all be supported, or they must all fall in the crash of a common ruin. The Catholics are the far more numerous part of the Christians in your country; and how can Christianity (that is now the point in issue) be supported under the persecution, or even under the discountenance, of the greater number of Christians? It is a great truth, and which in one of the debates I stated as strongly as I could to the House of Commons in the last session, that, if the Catholic religion is destroyed by the infidels, it is a most contemptible and absurd idea, that this, or any Protestant Church, can survive that event. Therefore my humble and decided opinion is, that all the three religions prevalent more or less in various parts of these islands ought all, in subordination to the legal establishments as they stand in the several countries, to be all countenanced, protected, and cherished, and that in Ireland particularly the Roman Catholic religion should be upheld in high respect and veneration, and should be, in its place, provided with all the means of making it a blessing to the people who profess it,—that it ought to be cherished as a good, (though not as the most preferable good, if a choice was now to be made,) and not tolerated as an inevitable evil. If this be my opinion as to the Catholic religion as a sect, you must see that I must be to the last degree averse to put a man, upon that account, upon a bad footing with relation to the privileges which the fundamental laws of this country give him as a subject. I am the more serious on the positive encouragement to be given to this religion, (always, however, as secondary,) because the serious and earnest belief and practice of it by its professors forms, as things stand, the most effectual barrier, if not the sole barrier, against Jacobinism. The Catholics form the great body of the lower ranks of your community, and no small part of those classes of the middling that come nearest to them. You know that the seduction of that part of mankind from the principles of religion, morality, subordination, and social order is the great object of the Jacobins. Let them grow lax, skeptical, careless, and indifferent with regard to religion, and, so sure as we have an existence, it is not a zealous Anglican or Scottish Church principle, but direct Jacobinism, which will enter into that breach. Two hundred years dreadfully spent in experiments to force that people to change the form of their religion have proved fruitless. You have now your choice, for full four fifths of your people, of the Catholic religion or Jacobinism. If things appear to you to stand on this alternative, I think you will not be long in making your option.
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