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some time mutinous and full of faction, until some popular
general, who understands the art of conciliating the soldiery, and
ivho possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of
all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal
account. There is no other way of securing military
obedience in this state of things. But the moment in which
that event shall happen, the person who really commands
your army is your master; the master (that is little) of your
king, the master of your Assembly, the master of your
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whole republic. [Italics mine].
This is an almost supernaturally prescient account of the way
in which the French Revolution would develop in practice.
One is compelled to wonder whether Thomas Paine ever
recalled it, during the long and arduous and frustrating
decade in which he lived through the unfolding of Burke's
8 3 I R I G H T S OF M A N , P A R T O N E
predictions. I do not know of any more chillingly accurate
forecast, with the exception of Rosa Luxemburg's famous
warning to Lenin, in 1918, that Bolshevik methods would
lead, first, to the dictatorship of one party, and then to a
dictatorship of that party's central committee, and finally to
absolute rule by one member of that central committee.
(Luxemburg's favourite pseudonym was 'Junius', for Lucius
Junius Brutus - not the Shakespearean regicide Brutus but the
hero and founder of the Roman republic. This makes it the
more apt, if only in retrospect, that Burke's friend and critic
Philip Francis employed the same pseudonym.)
Along with our use of the terms 'left' and 'right', we have
another means of distinguishing our political and intellectual
animals. It was taken by Isaiah Berlin from the ancient
philosopher Archilocus, who observed that 'the fox knows
many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing'. The
distinction is not hard and fast, any more than other sheep-
and-goats separations are hard and fast (one thinks of the
attempt to sort all English intellectuals into the categories of
Roundhead and Cavalier, or Edmund Wilson's classifying
of all Americans as either Redskins or Palefaces); and it
occasionally happens that men are foxes and hedgehogs
combined. Both Burke and Paine knew many things, and each
knew one big thing as well. For Burke, the big thing was that
the French Revolution would come to grief, and worse. For
Paine, the big thing was that the age of chivalry was indeed
dead, in that hereditary monarchy was doomed to give way
to a democracy based on suffrage rather than property.
R I G H T S OF M A N I 8 4
This is not to split the difference and to say that both men
were right. The exchange between them was extremely bitter,
and though the gap was sometimes narrow it was invariably
deep. Just to give one illustration: Paine, as we have seen, took
many more risks than Edmund Burke to save the life of the
monarch Burke so much admired (and, by extension, the lives
of his queen and his children). But he had no time to waste
on a recitation of Marie Antoinette's imaginary charms, and
dismissed Burke's panegyric in one curt line: 'He pities the
plumage, but forgets the dying bird.' Nor did he fail to take
Burke up on the matter of the Cervantes analogy. 'In the
rapture of his imagination, he has discovered a world of
windmills, and his sorrows are, that there are no Quixotes to
attack them.'
Paine's main assault, however, was on Burke's unsafe
assumption that the historic legitimacy of the 1688 monarchy
was something that existed in an ethereal region that was
beyond all critique. He seized particularly on Burke's
repeated use of the words 'for ever' to describe the emplace-
ment of the Glorious Revolution:
There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a
parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of
men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of
binding and controlling posterity to the 'end of time,' or of
commanding for ever how the world should be governed, or
who shall govern it: and therefore, all such clauses, acts or
declarations, by which the makers of them attempt to do
8 5 R I G H T S O F M A N , P A R T O N E
what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the
power to execute, are in themselves null and void. Every age
and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as
the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and
presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most
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ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.
The effect of these words on newly literate artisans, who
had seen others be imprisoned or transported merely for crit-
icism of the British monarchy, can well be imagined. But
Paine was not done with his repudiation of hereditary or
entrenched power. In a line which could have been used in
one of his essays against the slave trade, he proclaimed: 'Man
has no property in man.' He continued:
Neither has any generation a property in the generations
which are to follow. The parliament or the people of 1688,
or of any other period, has no more right to dispose of the
people of the present day, or to bind or to control them in
any shape whatever, than the parliament or the pfeople of the
present day have to dispose of, bind or control those who
are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence. Every
generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes
which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the
dead, that are to be accommodated. When man ceases to be,
his power and his wants cease with him; and having no
longer any participation in the concerns of this world, he
has no longer any authority in directing who shall be its
R I G H T S OF M A N I 8 6
governors, or how its government shall be organized, or
3
how administered.'
This belief, that 'the earth belongs to the living', had already [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]