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The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) by Edmund Burke

E >> Edmund Burke >> The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12)




The noble lord in the blue ribbon, last year, treated all this with
contempt. He never could conceive it possible that the French minister
of finance could go through that year with a loan of but seventeen
hundred thousand pounds, and that he should be able to fund that loan
without any tax. The second year, however, opens the very same scene. A
small loan, a loan of no more than two millions five hundred thousand
pounds, is to carry our enemies through the service of this year also.
No tax is raised to fund that debt; no tax is raised for the current
services. I am credibly informed that there is no anticipation
whatsoever. Compensations[31] are correctly made. Old debts continue to
be sunk as in the time of profound peace. Even payments which their
treasury had been authorized to suspend during the time of war are not
suspended.

A general reform, executed through every _department of the revenue_,
creates an annual income of more than half a million, whilst it
facilitates and simplifies all the functions of administration. The
king's _household_--at the remotest avenues to which all reformation has
been hitherto stopped, that household which has been the stronghold of
prodigality, the virgin fortress which was never before attacked--has
been not only not defended, but it has, even in the forms, been
surrendered by the king to the economy of his minister. No capitulation;
no reserve. Economy has entered in triumph into the public splendor of
the monarch, into his private amusements, into the appointments of his
nearest and highest relations. Economy and public spirit have made a
beneficent and an honest spoil: they have plundered from extravagance
and luxury, for the use of substantial service, a revenue of near four
hundred thousand pounds. The reform of the finances, joined to this
reform of the court, gives to the public nine hundred thousand pounds a
year, and upwards.

The minister who does these things is a great man; but the king who
desires that they should be done is a far greater. We must do justice to
our enemies: these are the acts of a patriot king. I am not in dread of
the vast armies of France; I am not in dread of the gallant spirit of
its brave and numerous nobility; I am not alarmed even at the great navy
which has been so miraculously created. All these things Louis the
Fourteenth had before. With all these things, the French monarchy has
more than once fallen prostrate at the feet of the public faith of Great
Britain. It was the want of public credit which disabled France from
recovering after her defeats, or recovering even from her victories and
triumphs. It was a prodigal court, it was an ill-ordered revenue, that
sapped the foundations of all her greatness. Credit cannot exist under
the arm of necessity. Necessity strikes at credit, I allow, with a
heavier and quicker blow under an arbitrary monarchy than under a
limited and balanced government; but still necessity and credit are
natural enemies, and cannot be long reconciled in any situation. From
necessity and corruption, a free state may lose the spirit of that
complex constitution which is the foundation of confidence. On the other
hand, I am far from being sure that a monarchy, when once it is properly
regulated, may not for a long time furnish a foundation for credit upon
the solidity of its maxims, though it affords no ground of trust in its
institutions. I am afraid I see in England, and in France, something
like a beginning of both these things. I wish I may be found in a
mistake.

This very short and very imperfect state of what is now going on in
France (the last circumstances of which I received in about eight days
after the registry of the edict[32]) I do not, Sir, lay before you for
any invidious purpose. It is in order to excite in us the spirit of a
noble emulation. Let the nations make war upon each other, (since we
must make war,) not with a low and vulgar malignity, but by a
competition of virtues. This is the only way by which both parties can
gain by war. The French have imitated us: let us, through them, imitate
ourselves,--ourselves in our better and happier days. If public
frugality, under whatever men, or in whatever mode of government, is
national strength, it is a strength which our enemies are in possession
of before us.

Sir, I am well aware that the state and the result of the French economy
which I have laid before you are even now lightly treated by some who
ought never to speak but from information. Pains have not been spared to
represent them as impositions on the public. Let me tell you, Sir, that
the creation of a navy, and a two years' war without taxing, are a very
singular species of imposture. But be it so. For what end does Necker
carry on this delusion? Is it to lower the estimation of the crown he
serves, and to render his own administration contemptible? No! No! He is
conscious that the sense of mankind is so clear and decided in favor of
economy, and of the weight and value of its resources, that he turns
himself to every species of fraud and artifice to obtain the mere
reputation of it. Men do not affect a conduct that tends to their
discredit. Let us, then, get the better of Monsieur Necker in his own
way; let us do in reality what he does only in pretence; let us turn his
French tinsel into English gold. Is, then, the mere opinion and
appearance of frugality and good management of such use to France, and
is the substance to be so mischievous to England? Is the very
constitution of Nature so altered by a sea of twenty miles, that economy
should give power on the Continent, and that profusion should give it
here? For God's sake, let not this be the only fashion of France which
we refuse to copy!

To the last kind of necessity, the desires of the people, I have but a
very few words to say. The ministers seem to contest this point, and
affect to doubt whether the people do really desire a plan of economy in
the civil government. Sir, this is too ridiculous. It is impossible that
they should not desire it. It is impossible that a prodigality which
draws its resources from their indigence should be pleasing to them.
Little factions of pensioners, and their dependants, may talk another
language. But the voice of Nature is against them, and it will be heard.
The people of England will not, they cannot, take it kindly, that
representatives should refuse to their constituents what an absolute
sovereign voluntarily offers to his subjects. The expression of the
petitions is, that, "_before any new burdens are laid upon this country,
effectual measures be taken by this House to inquire into and correct
the gross abuses in the expenditure of public money_."

This has been treated by the noble lord in the blue ribbon as a wild,
factious language. It happens, however, that the people, in their
address to us, use, almost word for word, the same terms as the king of
France uses in addressing himself to his people; and it differs only as
it falls short of the French king's idea of what is due to his subjects.
"To convince," says he, "our faithful subjects of _the desire we
entertain not to recur to new impositions_, until we have first
exhausted all the resources which order and economy can possibly
supply," &c., &c.

These desires of the people of England, which come far short of the
voluntary concessions of the king of France, are moderate indeed. They
only contend that we should interweave some economy with the taxes with
which we have chosen to begin the war. They request, not that you should
rely upon economy exclusively, but that you should give it rank and
precedence, in the order of the ways and means of this single session.

But if it were possible that the desires of our constituents, desires
which are at once so natural and so very much tempered and subdued,
should have no weight with an House of Commons which has its eye
elsewhere, I would turn my eyes to the very quarter to which theirs are
directed. I would reason this matter with the House on the mere policy
of the question; and I would undertake to prove that an early
dereliction of abuse is the direct interest of government,--of
government taken abstractedly from its duties, and considered merely as
a system intending its own conservation.

If there is any one eminent criterion which above all the rest
distinguishes a wise government from an administration weak and
improvident, it is this: "well to know the best time and manner of
yielding what it is impossible to keep." There have been, Sir, and
there are, many who choose to chicane with their situation rather than
be instructed by it. Those gentlemen argue against every desire of
reformation upon the principles of a criminal prosecution. It is enough
for them to justify their adherence to a pernicious system, that it is
not of their contrivance,--that it is an inheritance of absurdity,
derived to them from their ancestors,--that they can make out a long and
unbroken pedigree of mismanagers that have gone before them. They are
proud of the antiquity of their house; and they defend their errors as
if they were defending their inheritance, afraid of derogating from
their nobility, and carefully avoiding a sort of blot in their
scutcheon, which they think would degrade them forever.

It was thus that the unfortunate Charles the First defended himself on
the practice of the Stuart who went before him, and of all the Tudors.
His partisans might have gone to the Plantagenets. They might have found
bad examples enough, both abroad and at home, that could have shown an
ancient and illustrious descent. But there is a time when men will not
suffer bad things because their ancestors have suffered worse. There is
a time when the hoary head of inveterate abuse will neither draw
reverence nor obtain protection. If the noble lord in the blue ribbon
pleads, "_Not guilty_," to the charges brought against the present
system of public economy, it is not possible to give a fair verdict by
which he will not stand acquitted. But pleading is not our present
business. His plea or his traverse may be allowed as an answer to a
charge, when a charge is made. But if he puts himself in the way to
obstruct reformation, then the faults of his office instantly become
his own. Instead of a public officer in an abusive department, whose
province is an object to be regulated, he becomes a criminal who is to
be punished. I do most seriously put it to administration to consider
the wisdom of a timely reform. Early reformations are amicable
arrangements with a friend in power; late reformations are terms imposed
upon a conquered enemy: early reformations are made in cool blood; late
reformations are made under a state of inflammation. In that state of
things the people behold in government nothing that is respectable. They
see the abuse, and they will see nothing else. They fall into the temper
of a furious populace provoked at the disorder of a house of ill-fame;
they never attempt to correct or regulate; they go to work by the
shortest way: they abate the nuisance, they pull down the house.

This is my opinion with regard to the true interest of government. But
as it is the interest of government that reformation should be early, it
is the interest of the people that it should be temperate. It is their
interest, because a temperate reform is permanent, and because it has a
principle of growth. Whenever we improve, it is right to leave room for
a further improvement. It is right to consider, to look about us, to
examine the effect of what we have done. Then we can proceed with
confidence, because we can proceed with intelligence. Whereas in hot
reformations, in what men more zealous than considerate call _making
clear work_, the whole is generally so crude, so harsh, so indigested,
mixed with so much imprudence and so much injustice, so contrary to the
whole course of human nature and human institutions, that the very
people who are most eager for it are among the first to grow disgusted
at what they have done. Then some part of the abdicated grievance is
recalled from its exile in order to become a corrective of the
correction. Then the abuse assumes all the credit and popularity of a
reform. The very idea of purity and disinterestedness in politics falls
into disrepute, and is considered as a vision of hot and inexperienced
men; and thus disorders become incurable, not by the virulence of their
own quality, but by the unapt and violent nature of the remedies. A
great part, therefore, of my idea of reform is meant to operate
gradually: some benefits will come at a nearer, some at a more remote
period. We must no more make haste to be rich by parsimony than by
intemperate acquisition.

In my opinion, it is our duty, when we have the desires of the people
before us, to pursue them, not in the spirit of literal obedience, which
may militate with their very principle,--much less to treat them with a
peevish and contentious litigation, as if we were adverse parties in a
suit. It would, Sir, be most dishonorable for a faithful representative
of the Commons to take advantage of any inartificial expression of the
people's wishes, in order to frustrate their attainment of what they
have an undoubted right to expect. We are under infinite obligations to
our constituents, who have raised us to so distinguished a trust, and
have imparted such a degree of sanctity to common characters. We ought
to walk before them with purity, plainness, and integrity of
heart,--with filial love, and not with slavish fear, which is always a
low and tricking thing. For my own part, in what I have meditated upon
that subject, I cannot, indeed, take upon me to say I have the honor _to
follow_ the sense of the people. The truth is, _I met it on the way_,
while I was pursuing their interest according to my own ideas. I am
happy beyond expression to find that my intentions have so far coincided
with theirs, that I have not had, cause to be in the least scrupulous to
sign their petition, conceiving it to express my own opinions, as nearly
as general terms can express the object of particular arrangements.

I am therefore satisfied to act as a fair mediator between government
and the people, endeavoring to form a plan which should have both an
early and a temperate operation. I mean, that it should be substantial,
that it should be systematic, that it should rather strike at the first
cause of prodigality and corrupt influence than attempt to follow them
in all their effects.

It was to fulfil the first of these objects (the proposal of something
substantial) that I found myself obliged, at the outset, to reject a
plan proposed by an honorable and attentive member of Parliament,[33]
with very good intentions on his part, about a year or two ago. Sir, the
plan I speak of was the tax of twenty-five per cent moved upon places
and pensions during the continuance of the American war. Nothing, Sir,
could have met my ideas more than such a tax, if it was considered as a
practical satire on that war, and as a penalty upon those who led us
into it; but in any other view it appeared to me very liable to
objections. I considered the scheme as neither substantial, nor
permanent, nor systematical, nor likely to be a corrective of evil
influence. I have always thought employments a very proper subject of
regulation, but a very ill-chosen subject for a tax. An equal tax upon
property is reasonable; because the object is of the same quality
throughout. The species is the same; it differs only in its quantity.
But a tax upon salaries is totally of a different nature; there can be
no equality, and consequently no justice, in taxing them by the hundred
in the gross.

We have, Sir, on our establishment several offices which perform real
service: we have also places that provide large rewards for no service
at all. We have stations which are made for the public decorum, made for
preserving the grace and majesty of a great people: we have likewise
expensive formalities, which tend rather to the disgrace than the
ornament of the state and the court. This, Sir, is the real condition of
our establishments. To fall with the same severity on objects so
perfectly dissimilar is the very reverse of a reformation,--I mean a
reformation framed, as all serious things ought to be, in number,
weight, and measure.--Suppose, for instance, that two men receive a
salary of 800_l._ a year each. In the office of one there is nothing at
all to be done; in the other, the occupier is oppressed by its duties.
Strike off twenty-five per cent from these two offices, you take from
one man 200_l._ which in justice he ought to have, and you give in
effect to the other 600_l._ which he ought not to receive. The public
robs the former, and the latter robs the public; and this mode of mutual
robbery is the only way in which the office and the public can make up
their accounts.

But the balance, in settling the account of this double injustice, is
much against the state. The result is short. You purchase a saving of
two hundred pounds by a profusion of six. Besides, Sir, whilst you leave
a supply of unsecured money behind, wholly at the discretion of
ministers, they make up the tax to such places as they wish to favor, or
in such new places as they may choose to create. Thus the civil list
becomes oppressed with debt; and the public is obliged to repay, and to
repay with an heavy interest, what it has taken by an injudicious tax.
Such has been the effect of the taxes hitherto laid on pensions and
employments, and it is no encouragement to recur again to the same
expedient.

In effect, such a scheme is not calculated to produce, but to prevent
reformation. It holds out a shadow of present gain to a greedy and
necessitous public, to divert their attention from those abuses which in
reality are the great causes of their wants. It is a composition to stay
inquiry; it is a fine paid by mismanagement for the renewal of its
lease; what is worse, it is a fine paid by industry and merit for an
indemnity to the idle and the worthless. But I shall say no more upon
this topic, because (whatever may be given out to the contrary) I know
that the noble lord in the blue ribbon perfectly agrees with me in these
sentiments.

After all that I have said on this subject, I am so sensible that it is
our duty to try everything which may contribute to the relief of the
nation, that I do not attempt wholly to reprobate the idea even of a
tax. Whenever, Sir, the incumbrance of useless office (which lies no
less a dead weight upon the service of the state than upon its revenues)
shall be removed,--when the remaining offices shall be classed according
to the just proportion of their rewards and services, so as to admit the
application of an equal rule to their taxation,--when the discretionary
power over the civil list cash shall be so regulated that a minister
shall no longer have the means of repaying with a private what is taken
by a public hand,--if, after all these preliminary regulations, it
should be thought that a tax on places is an object worthy of the public
attention, I shall be very ready to lend my hand to a reduction of their
emoluments.

Having thus, Sir, not so much absolutely rejected as postponed the plan
of a taxation of office, my next business was to find something which
might be really substantial and effectual. I am quite clear, that, if we
do not go to the very origin and first ruling cause of grievances, we do
nothing. What does it signify to turn abuses out of one door, if we are
to let them in at another? What does it signify to promote economy upon
a measure, and to suffer it to be subverted in the principle? Our
ministers are far from being wholly to blame for the present ill order
which prevails. Whilst institutions directly repugnant to good
management are suffered to remain, no effectual or lasting reform _can_
be introduced.

I therefore thought it necessary, as soon as I conceived thoughts of
submitting to you some plan of reform, to take a comprehensive view of
the state of this country,--to make a sort of survey of its
jurisdictions, its estates, and its establishments. Something in every
one of them seemed to me to stand in the way of all economy in their
administration, and prevented every possibility of methodizing the
system. But being, as I ought to be, doubtful of myself, I was resolved
not to proceed in an _arbitrary_ manner in any particular which tended
to change the settled state of things, or in any degree to affect the
fortune or situation, the interest or the importance, of any individual.
By an arbitrary proceeding I mean one conducted by the private
opinions, tastes, or feelings of the man who attempts to regulate. These
private measures are not standards of the exchequer, nor balances of the
sanctuary. General principles cannot be debauched or corrupted by
interest or caprice; and by those principles I was resolved to work.

Sir, before I proceed further, I will lay these principles fairly before
you, that afterwards you may be in a condition to judge whether every
object of regulation, as I propose it, comes fairly under its rule. This
will exceedingly shorten all discussion between us, if we are perfectly
in earnest in establishing a system of good management. I therefore lay
down to myself seven fundamental rules: they might, indeed, be reduced
to two or three simple maxims; but they would be too general, and their
application to the several heads of the business before us would not be
so distinct and visible. I conceive, then,

_First_, That all jurisdictions which furnish more matter of
expense, more temptation to oppression, or more means and
instruments of corrupt influence, than advantage to justice or
political administration, ought to be abolished.

_Secondly_, That all public estates which are more subservient to
the purposes of vexing, overawing, and influencing those who hold
under them, and to the expense of perception and management, than
of benefit to the revenue, ought, upon every principle both of
revenue and of freedom, to be disposed of.

_Thirdly_, That all offices which bring more charge than
proportional advantage to the state, that all offices which may be
engrafted on others, uniting and simplifying their duties, ought,
in the first case, to be taken away, and, in the second, to be
consolidated.

_Fourthly_, That all such offices ought to be abolished as obstruct
the prospect of the general superintendent of finance, which
destroy his superintendency, which disable him from foreseeing and
providing for charges as they may occur, from preventing expense in
its origin, checking it in its progress, or securing its
application to its proper purposes. A minister, under whom expenses
can be made without his knowledge, can never say what it is that he
can spend, or what it is that he can save.

_Fifthly_, That it is proper to establish an invariable order in
all payments, which will prevent partiality, which will give
preference to services, not according to the importunity of the
demandant, but the rank and order of their utility or their
justice.

_Sixthly_, That it is right to reduce every establishment and every
part of an establishment (as nearly as possible) to certainty, the
life of all order and good management.

_Seventhly_, That all subordinate treasuries, as the nurseries of
mismanagement, and as naturally drawing to themselves as much money
as they can, keeping it as long as they can, and accounting for it
as late as they can, ought to be dissolved. They have a tendency to
perplex and distract the public accounts, and to excite a suspicion
of government even beyond the extent of their abuse.

Under the authority and with the guidance of those principles I
proceed,--wishing that nothing in any establishment may be changed,
where I am not able to make a strong, direct, and solid application of
those principles, or of some one of them. An economical constitution is
a necessary basis for an economical administration.

First, with regard to the sovereign jurisdictions, I must observe, Sir,
that whoever takes a view of this kingdom in a cursory manner will
imagine that he beholds a solid, compacted, uniform system of monarchy,
in which all inferior jurisdictions are but as rays diverging from one
centre. But on examining it more nearly, you find much eccentricity and
confusion. It is not a _monarchy_ in strictness. But, as in the Saxon
times this country was an heptarchy, it is now a strange sort of
_pentarchy_. It is divided into five several distinct principalities,
besides the supreme. There is, indeed, this difference from the Saxon
times,--that, as in the itinerant exhibitions of the stage, for want of
a complete company, they are obliged to throw a variety of parts on
their chief performer, so our sovereign condescends himself to act not
only the principal, but all the subordinate parts in the play. He
condescends to dissipate the royal character, and to trifle with those
light, subordinate, lacquered sceptres in those hands that sustain the
ball representing the world, or which wield the trident that commands
the ocean. Cross a brook, and you lose the King of England; but you have
some comfort in coming again under his Majesty, though "shorn of his
beams," and no more than Prince of Wales. Go to the north, and you find
him dwindled to a Duke of Lancaster; turn to the west of that north, and
he pops upon you in the humble character of Earl of Chester. Travel a
few miles on, the Earl of Chester disappears, and the king surprises
you again as Count Palatine of Lancaster. If you travel beyond Mount
Edgecombe, you find him ones more in his incognito, and he is Duke of
Cornwall. So that, quite fatigued and satiated with this dull variety,
you are infinitely refreshed when you return to the sphere of his proper
splendor, and behold your amiable sovereign in his true, simple,
undisguised, native character of Majesty.

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