Revolution of Fructidor, which extinguished all moderate counsels, and paved the way for the ambitious and unscrupulous despotism of Bonaparte. The Lille negotiations were yet going on, when Canning wrote to a member of the embassy: 'There is but one event, but that is an event for the world-Burke is dead! .... He is the man that will mark this age, marked as it is in itself by events, to all time.1'

Dr. French Laurence, an eminent civilian, whose association with Burke during the Hastings Impeachment had led to the closest political and social relations with him, and Dr. Walker King, Bishop of Rochester, were Burke's literary executors. The Third Letter on a Regicide Peace was prepared for the press by the former; the Fourth, by the latter. The exact condition in which the Third Letter came to the hands of Laurence is described in the Advertisements, prefixed to it on publication, and reprinted in the present volume. Laurence added to it what was necessary to fill up the design: and the added portions are easy to be distinguished from the original. In the part written by Burke's own hand it is impossible to trace any marks of declining intellectual power. But it is easy to trace in it a declining disposition or ability to employ the old weapons of authorship. The rare exuberance, the inextinguishable force and vivacity which mark the 'Letter to a Noble Lord,' and are not wanting in the 'Fourth Letter,' are gone. In part, no doubt, they were destroyed by pain and debility. Nothing remains but the clear vision, the unimpaired judgment, the stern penetration which fact and reason alone endure, and the large conception which appears, to any other mind becoming for the first time familiar with it, almost a revelation.

The 'Regicide Peace' Letters form a natural complement to the two volumes of Burke's Select Works already issued in the present series. The main topic of the Tract and Speeches contained in the first volume is the relation of Government to the people in the mass, whether at home or in the colonies. The main topic of the famous work contained in the second volume is the relation of the present generation of men, viewed as a political body, to those which have passed away, and to those which are to come. The question in the present volume is the

1 Malmesbury's Correspondence, Vol. III. p. 398.

almost equally inexhaustible one of the relation of separate nations to that great family of nations which is called the civilized world. Of this question the interest is inexhaustible because it is perpetual, and because the conditions which surround it are perpetually changing. It is one which is passed on from one generation of Englishmen to another, with the continuous life of the great community itself which they compose. The duty and interest of England as a member of the European family of nations is indeed a large subject. We have it in the present volume discussed by a large and forethoughtful mind. In times when the duties of nations to their neighbours are as little settled, so far at least as belongs to practice, as were the duties of man in the Hobbesian state of nature, and when political conditions all over the world are rapidly becoming such that the attitude of nations to each other is practically determined, and determined in a very short space of time, by the capricious impulses of a majority told by the head, the mature conclusions of one so wise and so well-informed as Burke on this subject should possess some interest. Let us see, as briefly as possible, to what those conclusions amount.

In the preface to a previous volume of Burke's works1 we have sketched out Burke's doctrine of the position of the individual man in relation to mankind at large. Man is so formed as to be entirely controlled by instincts arising from intercourse with his neighbours. Severance from his fellow-men means the extinction of those controlling instincts, and the extinction, in and through them, of all the power that gives to man's natural eminence in the animal world its natural extent and significance. Now the common relations and interests of men in society, their mutual likings and dislikings, their jealousies and their ambitions, their selfishness and their generosity, and the whole mass of the sentiments and the reasonings which practically guide them, each and all have their parallel in the relations of nations. No nation can isolate itself from the rest of the world, without committing moral suicide. No nation can cast off its responsibility, whether to its neighbours, or to its own children, or even to its yet unborn descendants. The nation that shows any signs of this betrayal of its inherited trusts is on the high road to dissolution.

1 Select Works of Burke, Vol. II. p. xl. (Second Edition.)

But how far does this analogy between the human individual and the body politic hold good? Limits it unquestionably has. Those passions which sway alike the state and the individual have the former under less thorough control. Fear is less paralysing: generosity and enthusiasm are less inspiring: the mighty collective mass is slower both in its sympathies and its repugnances. The human individual, again, presuming him to escape casual causes of death, is sure of dissolution in the ordinary course of nature within a certain space of time. But it is false to argue from this to similar conditions in the body politic. The body politic, well says Mr. Mill, may indeed die: but it dies of disease or violence, not of old age. That grand and beautiful relation which subsists between an old country and its offshoots which are settled beyond seas, has been the subject of a more pernicious misconception. What business, Burke had

heard it gravely argued in Parliament, has a child to rebel against its parent, and therefore, what business have the Colonies to resist taxation from home? It is clear, therefore, that the analogy has its limits; perhaps very narrow ones.

The general question to which Burke's arguments belong is, When is a nation bound to go to war, and having once gone to war, when is it justified in making peace? Wars, said Burke, are suits to the tribunal of God's justice. That fearful tribunal is not to be lightly invoked. Justa bella quibus necessaria. A war is only just when it is also necessary: and it only becomes necessary when all other means of accomplishing its object have been tried, and have failed. War is to the community of nations what the ordinary means of justice are to single societies. It is clear that therefore nothing can banish it from the world which does not also banish international justice from the world. Those who say otherwise can scarcely impose even upon themselves. When diplomacy has failed, war is the sole means of obtaining redress among nations: and nations, in their own suits, fulfil the functions both of advocate and judge. Socially viewed, man has ceased to be judge in his own cause as soon as he has emerged from the Hobbesian state of nature. Here, then, the analogy of the state and the individual terminates. In the appeal to justice, states are burdened with a responsibility of which the individual now knows nothing. On the question of that justice itself, the analogy is still valid. Justice is either civil or criminal. To

obtain his civil rights, a man has recourse to the law; he has recourse to the same law to protect himself from wrong by punishing the malefactor in such a way as shall deter generally from the commission of the offence. Criminal justice, in its true aspect, is strictly preventive: the murderer is sent to the gallows, not because he has murdered a man, but that men may not be murdered. Of vindictive or avenging justice, fully civilized society knows nothing. That form of justice, in the strict sense, has long been left by legislators to other and not less potent instruments; to social penalties, to the guilty conscience, and to the awful Power which says 'Vengeance is mine, I will repay.' Both these forms of justice have their analogies in that transcendent justice which a nation demands by making war. But England stands with regard to the appeal to war in a different relation from the rest of Europe: in a relation, indeed, so far as relates to offensive war, which may be described as intermediate between that of the rest of Europe and that of America. So far as relates to defensive war, the case is otherwise. Here England must fully realize and amply guard against the strategic dangers which are peculiar to her position. The relations of England with the rest of Europe differ widely from the relations among themselves of the nations which compose the rest of Europe. The physical cause, in Burke's phrase, is 'a slender dyke of five and twenty miles.' This insular position has been the occasion, while other powerful elements have been the efficient causes, of England's vast commerce, and of England's naval superiority. England's interests lie less on the continent than on the sea-shore: her neighbours inhabit the coasts of the whole world. New York and Bombay are nearer to her than Paris and Vienna; disturbances in the highlands of India and China, war in the Drakenberg or the Rocky Mountains, touch her more nearly than such events at her own door as the annexation of Holstein, or the separation of Belgium and Holland. But her navy and her purse are tempting objects to the designing politicians of Europe: and happy is the European schemer who can make a cat's-paw of Great Britain. And there are a mean sort of Englishmen who are anxious that England should be ever huffing and swaggering in the councils of Europe, as if this great kingdom, with her six hundred years of national glory, with her splendid offshoots and dependencies on every habitable, shore

of the globe, were in continual peril of being cast into the shade by some brand-new Republic or Empire of yesterday. The difference between England and the rest of Europe is a difference in kind. The deduction which in Burke's time was drawn from this, and which in a modified form has survived all subsequent changes in the European system, was well expresssd by Waller, in his famous comparison of the situation of England to that of the mysterious powers of the air:

'Angels and we have this prerogative,

That none can at our happy seats arrive:
While we descend at pleasure to invade

The bad with vengeance, and the good to aid.'

England was the natural arbitress of Europe. This position had been aspired to by Henry the Eighth: it had been seized by Elizabeth: it had been gloriously held by Cromwell: it had been extended and confirmed by William of Orange: within living memory it had been pushed to the utmost, amidst the plaudits of the world, by Chatham. To most Englishmen in those days the doctrine of Waller's lines was a matter not only of belief, but of sentiment. England was proudly conscious of being the supreme court of appeal in the transcendent lawsuits of Europe. Moral causes alone could put her mighty forces in motion: and these moral causes might lie not only in wrongs attempted on herself, but in those attempted on others. As to what England should construe as a wrong to herself, it was unnecessary to examine; it was sufficient that England was always able to make up her mind on the question when the contingency occurred. The question of the wrongs of others was more difficult. Now, both these questions were united in the case of the war with France. England had at her door a political nuisance which was fast spreading over Europe, and even propagating itself within England's own limits. Was England justified in going to war? In the circumstances, according to the standard maxims of eighty years ago, unquestionably she was.

By which of the different forms of justice enumerated by the philosophers was England's war with France justified? Burke answered, in the first place, by the civil law itself. Suppose your neighbour's house to have been seized by a gang of thieves and assassins, who after murdering the owner, and driving out his