ink
with regard to individuals; thus I think with regard to ancient and
respected governments and orders of men. A spirit of reformation is
never more consistent with itself than when it refuses to be rendered
the means of destruction.
I suppose that enough is said upon these heads of accusation. One more I
had nearly forgotten, but I shall soon dispatch it. The author of the
Reflections, in the opening of the last Parliament, entered on the
journals of the House of Commons a motion for a remonstrance to the
crown, which is substantially a defence of the preceding Parliament,
that had been dissolved under displeasure. It is a defence of Mr. Fox.
It is a defence of the Whigs. By what connection of argument, by what
association of ideas, this apology for Mr. Fox and his party is by him
and them brought to criminate his and their apologist, I cannot easily
divine. It is true that Mr. Burke received no previous encouragement
from Mr. Fox, nor any the least countenance or support, at the time when
the motion was made, from him or from any gentleman of the party,--one
only excepted, from whose friendship, on that and on other occasions, he
derives an honor to which he must be dull indeed to be insensible.[11]
If that remonstrance, therefore, was a false or feeble defence of the
measures of the party, they were in no wise affected by it. It stands on
the journals. This secures to it a permanence which the author cannot
expect to any other work of his. Let it speak for itself to the present
age and to all posterity. The party had no concern in it; and it can
never be quoted against them. But in the late debate it was produced,
not to clear the party from an improper defence in which they had no
share, but for the kind purpose of insinuating an inconsistency between
the principles of Mr. Burke's defence of the dissolved Parliament and
those on which he proceeded in his late Reflections on France.
It requires great ingenuity to make out such a parallel between the two
cases as to found a charge of inconsistency in the principles assumed in
arguing the one and the other. What relation had Mr. Fox's India Bill to
the Constitution of France? What relation had that Constitution to the
question of right in an House of Commons to give or to withhold its
confidence from ministers, and to state that opinion to the crown? What
had this discussion to do with Mr. Burke's idea in 1784 of the ill
consequences which must in the end arise to
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