Selection from Reflections on the Revolution in
Believe me, Sir, those who attempt to level, never equalise. In all societies, consisting of various
descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The levellers therefore only change and pervert the natural
order of things; they load the edifice of society, by setting up in the air
what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground. The
association of tailors and carpenters, of which the republic (of
The Chancellor of France at the opening of
the states, said, in a tone of oratorical flourish, that all occupations were honourable. If he meant only, that no honest employment was
disgraceful, he would not have gone beyond the truth. But in asserting that
anything is honourable, we imply some distinction in
its favour. The occupation of a hair-dresser, or of a
working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour
to any person—to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments.
Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the
state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively are permitted to rule. In this you think you are combating
prejudice, but you are at war with nature.
I do not, my dear Sir, conceive you to be of
that sophistical, captious spirit, or of that uncandid
dulness, as to require, for every general observation
or sentiment, an explicit detail of the correctives and exceptions, which
reason will presume to be included in all the general propositions which come
from reasonable men. You do not imagine, that I wish to confine power,
authority, and distinction to blood, and names, and titles. No, Sir. There is
no qualification for government but virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive.
Wherever they are actually found, they have, in whatever state, condition,
profession, or trade, the passport of Heaven to human place and honour. Woe to the country which would madly and impiously
reject the service of the talents and virtues, civil, military, or religious,
that are given to grace and to serve it; and would condemn to obscurity
everything formed to diffuse lustre and glory around
a state! Woe to that country too, that, passing into the opposite extreme,
considers a low education, a mean contracted view of things, a sordid,
mercenary occupation, as a preferable title to command! Everything ought to be
open; but not indifferently to every man. No rotation; no appointment by lot;
no mode of election operating in the spirit of sortition,
or rotation, can be generally good in a government conversant in extensive
objects. Because they have no tendency, direct or indirect, to select the man
with a view to the duty, or to accommodate the one to the other. I do not
hesitate to say, that the road to eminence and power, from obscure condition,
ought not to be made too easy, nor a thing too much of
course. If rare merit be the rarest of all rare things, it ought to pass
through some sort of probation. The temple of honour
ought to be seated on an eminence. If it be opened through virtue, let it be
remembered too, that virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some
struggle.
Nothing is a due and adequate representation
of a state, that does not represent its ability, as
well as its property. But as ability is a vigorous and active principle, and as
property is sluggish, inert, and timid, it never can be safe from the invasions
of ability, unless it be, out of all proportion, predominant in the
representation. It must be represented too in great masses of accumulation, or
it is not rightly protected. The characteristic essence of property, formed out
of the combined principles of its acquisition and conservation, is to be unequal.
The great masses therefore which excite envy, and tempt rapacity, must be put
out of the possibility of danger. Then they form a natural rampart about the
lesser properties in all their gradations. The same quantity of property, which
is by the natural course of things divided among many, has not the same
operation. Its defensive power is weakened as it is diffused. In this diffusion
each man’s portion is less than what, in the eagerness of his desires, he may
flatter himself to obtain by dissipating the accumulations of others. The plunder
of the few would indeed give but a share inconceivably small in the
distribution to the many. But the many are not capable of making this
calculation; and those who lead them to rapine never intend this distribution.
The power of perpetuating our property in our
families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to
it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself. It
makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon
avarice. The possessors of family wealth, and of the
distinction which attends hereditary possession, (as most concerned in it) are
the natural securities for this transmission. With us the House of Peers is
formed upon this principle. It is wholly composed of hereditary property and
hereditary distinction; and made therefore the third of the legislature; and,
in the last event, the sole judge of all property in all its subdivisions. The
House of Commons too, though not necessarily, yet in fact, is always so
composed, in the far greater part. Let those large proprietors be what they
will, and they have their chance of being amongst the best, they are, at the
very worst, the ballast in the vessel of the commonwealth. For though hereditary
wealth, and the rank which goes with it, are too much idolized by creeping
sycophants, and the blind, abject admirers of power, they are too rashly
slighted in shallow speculations of the petulant, assuming, short-sighted
coxcombs of philosophy. Some decent, regulated pre-eminence, some preference
(not exclusive appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust,
nor impolitic.
It is said, that twenty-four millions ought
to prevail over two hundred thousand. True; if the constitution of a kingdom be
a problem of arithmetic. This sort of discourse does well enough with the
lamp-post for its second: to men who may reason calmly, it is
ridiculous. The will of the many, and their interest, must very often differ;
and great will be the difference when they make an evil choice. A government of
five hundred country attornies and obscure curates is
not good for twenty-four millions of men, though it were chosen by eight and
forty millions; nor is it the better for being guided by a dozen of persons of
quality, who have betrayed their trust in order to obtain that power. At
present, you seem in everything to have strayed out of the high road of nature.
The property of
From Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs by Edmund Burke (1791)
To enable men to act with the
weight and character of a people, and to answer the ends for which they are
incorporated into that capacity, we must suppose them (by means immediate or
consequential) to be in that state of habitual social discipline, in which the
wiser, the more expert, and the more opulent, conduct, and by conducting
enlighten and protect the weaker, the less knowing, and the less provided with
the goods of fortune. When the multitude are not under
this discipline, they can scarcely be said to be in civil society. . . .
A true natural aristocracy is
not a separate interest in the state, or separable from it. It is an essential
integrant part of any large people rightly constituted. It is formed out of a
class of legitimate presumptions, which, taken as generalities, must be
admitted for actual truths. To
be bred in a place of estimation; To see nothing low and sordid from one’s
infancy; To be taught to respect one’s self; To be habituated to the censorial
inspection of the public eye; To look early to public opinion; To stand upon
such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the wide-spread
and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society;
To have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; To be enabled to draw the court
and attention of the wise and learned wherever they are to be found; To be
habituated in armies to command and to obey; To be taught to despise danger in
the pursuit of honour and duty; To be formed to the greatest degree of
vigilance, foresight, and circumspection, in a state of things in which no
fault is committed with impunity, and the slightest mistakes draw on the most
ruinous consequences—To be led to a guarded and regulated conduct, from a sense
that you are considered as an instructor of your fellow-citizens in their
highest concerns, and that you act as a reconciler between God and man—To be
employed as an administrator of law and justice, and to be thereby amongst the
first benefactors to mankind—To be a professor of high science, or of liberal
and ingenuous art—To be amongst rich traders, who from their success are
presumed to have sharp and vigorous understandings, and to possess the virtues
of diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated an
habitual regard to commutative justice—These are the circumstances of men, that
form what I should call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no
nation.
The state of civil society, which necessarily generates this
aristocracy, is a state of nature; and much more truly so than a savage and
incoherent mode of life. For man is by nature reasonable; and he is never
perfectly in his natural state, but when he is placed where reason may be best
cultivated, and most predominates. Art is man’s nature. We are as much, at
least, in a state of nature in formed manhood, as in immature and helpless
infancy. Men qualified in the manner I have just described,
form in nature, as she operates in the common modification of society, the
leading, guiding, and governing part. It is the soul to the body, without which
the man does not exist. To give therefore no more importance, in the social
order, to such descriptions of men, than that of so many units, is an horrible usurpation.
When
great multitudes act together, under that discipline of nature, I recognize the
people. I
acknowledge something that perhaps equals, and ought always to guide, the
sovereignty of convention. In all things the voice of this grand chorus of
national harmony ought to have a mighty and decisive influence. But when you
disturb this harmony; when you break up this beautiful order, this array of
truth and nature, as well as of habit and prejudice; when you separate the
common sort of men from their proper chieftains so as to form them into an
adverse army, I no longer know that venerable object called the people in such
a disbanded race of deserters and vagabonds. For a while they may be terrible
indeed; but in such a manner as wild beasts are terrible. The mind owes to them
no sort of submission. They are, as they have always been reputed, rebels. They
may lawfully be fought with, and brought under, whenever an advantage offers.
Those who attempt by outrage and violence to deprive men of any advantage which
they hold under the laws, and to destroy the natural order of life, proclaim
war against them.