Burke | Page 7

not be exposed to destruction at the hands of
rationalistic criticism. This was Burke's most fundamental and
unswerving conviction from the first piece that he wrote down to the
last, and down to the last hour of his existence.
It is a coincidence worth noticing that only two years before the
appearance of the Vindication, Rousseau had published the second of
the two memorable Discourses in which he insisted with serious
eloquence on that which Burke treats as a triumph of irony. He believed,
and many thousands of Frenchmen came to a speculative agreement

with him, that artificial society had marked a decline in the felicity of
man, and there are passages in the Discourse in which he demonstrates
this, that are easily interchangeable with passages in the Vindication.
Who would undertake to tell us from internal evidence whether the
following page, with its sombre glow, is an extract from Burke, or an
extract from the book which Rousseau begins by the sentence that man
is born free, yet is he everywhere in chains?--
There are in Great Britain upwards of a hundred thousand people
employed in lead, tin, iron, copper, and coal mines; these unhappy
wretches scarce ever see the light of the sun; they are buried in the
bowels of the earth; there they work at a severe and dismal task,
without the least prospect of being delivered from it; they subsist upon
the coarsest and worst sort of fare; they have their health miserably
impaired, and their lives cut short, by being perpetually confined in the
close vapour of these malignant minerals. A hundred thousand more at
least are tortured without remission by the suffocating smoke, intense
fires, and constant drudgery, necessary in refining and managing the
products of those mines. If any man informed us that two hundred
thousand innocent persons were condemned to so intolerable slavery,
how should we pity the unhappy sufferers, and how great would be our
just indignation against those who inflicted so cruel and ignominious a
punishment!... But this number, considerable as it is, and the slavery,
with all its baseness and horror, which we have at home, is nothing to
what the rest of the world affords of the same nature. Millions daily
bathed in the poisonous damps and destructive effluvia of lead, silver,
copper, and arsenic, to say nothing of those other employments, those
stations of wretchedness and contempt, in which civil society has
placed the numerous enfans perdus of her army. Would any rational
man submit to one of the most tolerable of these drudgeries, for all the
artificial enjoyments which policy has made to result from them?...
Indeed the blindness of one part of mankind co-operating with the
frenzy and villainy of the other, has been the real builder of this
respectable fabric of political society: and as the blindness of mankind
has caused their slavery, in return their state of slavery is made a
pretence for continuing them in a state of blindness; for the politician
will tell you gravely that their life of servitude disqualifies the greater

part of the race of man for a search of truth, and supplies them with no
other than mean and insufficient ideas. This is but too true; and this is
one of the reasons for which I blame such institutions.
From the very beginning, therefore, Burke was drawn to the deepest of
all the currents in the thought of the eighteenth century. Johnson and
Goldsmith continued the traditions of social and polite literature which
had been established by the Queen Anne men. Warburton and a whole
host of apologists carried on the battle against deism and infidelity.
Hume, after furnishing the arsenal of scepticism with a new array of
deadlier engines and more abundant ammunition, had betaken himself
placidly to the composition of history. What is remarkable in Burke's
first performance is his discernment of the important fact, that behind
the intellectual disturbances in the sphere of philosophy, and the noisier
agitations in the sphere of theology, there silently stalked a force that
might shake the whole fabric of civil society itself. In France, as all
students of its speculative history are agreed, there came a time in the
eighteenth century when theological controversy was turned into
political controversy. Innovators left the question about the truth of
Christianity, and busied themselves with questions about the ends and
means of governments. The appearance of Burke's Vindication of
Natural Society coincides in time with the beginning of this important
transformation. Burke foresaw from the first what, if rationalism were
allowed to run an unimpeded course, would be the really great business
of the second halt of his century.
If in his first book Burke showed how alive he was to the profound
movement of the time, in the second he dealt with