Is it depressing or impressive that Burke, writing in the 1760s and 1780s, offered more serious and practicable solutions to longstanding racial and economic injustices than we have often seen since? What should startle the starry-eyed progressive, brimming bucket-ful with ideological purities and dissolving solutions, is that Burke’s ideas are better than theirs, despite the fact that his solutions included retaining a state preference for a religious sect, and the short-term continuation of the slave trade.
Burke’s “Tracts on the Popery Laws” and his “Sketch of a Negro Code” are both pragmatic but bold responses to the abiding social crimes of Britain, which still cast long shadows – its oppression of the Catholic Irish, and its involvement in the slave trade and slavery. Burke does not offer, in either case, an abstract axiom to be declared as policy. He has taken care to understand why each situation has arisen, and which opposite evils may be unleashed by thoughtless “reform”. Nonetheless, he offers material analysis and policy proposals that, if followed here, may have allowed some partial reconciliation between the British and Irish portions of our Isles, and if followed in the West Indies and by the USA, would have had a far better chance of settling ex-slave populations into tolerably ordered liberty and wealth than those policies which were followed. Listening to him still provides a real route forward.
Burke was a Protestant and white man, yet his sympathies were with the Catholic and black man – and that is enough to note. He was not a wild-eyed secularist or abolitionist, preferring rather to work with the intractable realities of the world than against them or without them. He looked to those historic factors which have caused flourishing and abundance and independence, and sought to apply them to the situation of who suffered unjust (and counter-productive) oppression. His natural and moral sympathies were with Catholics and blacks, but he also knew to make his proposals palatable to Protestant whites – because wider real flourishing benefits everyone, including the richest.
The first work – “Tracts on the Popery Laws” – is fragmentary, and largely consists of a negative analysis of the then-existing Laws. Burke applied his influence over later Governments to the good of the Irish Catholics, and of course another Irish Protestant would make larger steps in Catholic Emancipation. However, the implicit drive of Burke’s analysis in the Tracts (explicit elsewhere, as we shall see) was never really adopted, to the Kingdom’s ruin, and the continuing pain of both halves of that divided island.
Burke’s chief target in the “Tracts” are those laws which disabled Irish Catholics from accumulating or developing property. He lists these in detail, rancid and vile in their enormities as the ink is on the page. A Catholic landowner with multiple sons had to divide his land amongst them, in a sort of gavelkind – which accomplished the reduction either of the Catholic menfolk of a family, or of the unified property of that same family. A Catholic landowner whose sons converted to Anglicanism could be sued by his sons for their inheritance in his lifetime. Various similar ways of robbing the Catholic farmer of land were inoculated into the property code, like poison in the water.
Not only these, but their ability to acquire land was crippled. They could rent passels of land for 39 years, and no more. They could not buy. Breaches of various laws punitive only against Catholics could lead to forfeiture – so, for instance, if a rental had verbal clauses in it that breached the Popery Laws, the whole contract would be void and the Catholic lose further land by it.
Burke execrates these Laws utterly. They put strife in the family, the base unit of civilisation – a son was encouraged to defraud his father, a wife to sue her husband. They reduced families to penury as penalty their very fecundity, the very quality that ought to have allowed them to cultivate and acquire. They prevented skill and labour to acquire its proper reward – not by any negative lack, but by positive ban. They, further, condemned much land – whether owned or rented – to deteriorating condition, with short tenures and the inevitability of division rendering improvement a poor investment. These are Burke’s comminations, and they are damning. The Laws attacked the dignity of man, they rendered Ireland poorer and less commercially valuable, and they failed in their very purpose – they did not render the populace more likely to become Protestant, or to be serious in obedience to the Crown, and so did not help secure religious or political peace.
In his early work on Ireland, those were Burke’s criticisms; in some of the last political letters of his life (1793-1795, particularly), he returned to the topic, again taking the side of the Catholics, but with an added urgency. Now, the intransigence of the Protestant Ascendancy risked putting the Irish into the hands of the Jacobins, those great destroyers of peace and decency in France. Burke saw as only prophets see; in 1798, of course, the Revolutionary Government would aid the United Irishmen (who were led by exactly the sort of disaffected radicals Burke predicted would arise). This is how he put it to Sir Hercules Langrishe:
“Next to religion, property is the great point of Jacobin attack. Here many of the debaters in your majority, and their writers, have given the Jacobins all the assistance their hearts can wish. When the Catholics desire places and seats, you tell them that this is only a pretext . . . but that their real view is, to strip Protestants of their property. . . If you treat men as robbers, why, robbers, sooner or later, they will become.”
The “Tracts” sum up the destructive effect the Popery Laws had; the later letters sum this up positively, as a need to provide Irish Catholics with the means of acquiring and developing property. Indeed, Burke considers that civic disqualifications – from Parliament, from officer rank in the army, and so forth – were foolish but of much less importance than property. Virtually no Catholics would be returned to an emancipated Parliament, but most Catholics would benefit from the easing of those laws opposing Catholic property. The development of Catholic property would be a bulwark against Jacobin influence in Ireland.
Burke did not give a particular programme for developing Catholic prosperity in Ireland, except in that he supported measures easing persecutory laws. He did offer a programme for providing Negro slaves in the West Indies simple and realistic routes to mass freedom and property ownership. We should not be surprised at Burke’s boldness in this direction; like most educated Christians of the time, he abhorred slavery, but moreover, he considered civic freedom at the heart of the English Constitution. He told Parliament, in his “Speech on Conciliation with America”, that Britain had much still to offer America, if only it surrendered its illegitimate demands:
“Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil . . . But, until you have become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you.”
The United States did not, finally, have freedom as a gift of the English Constitution, but at the blood price of 700,000 young men and the suffering of millions of blacks.
In “Sketch of a Negro Code”, Burke outlined first several measures to regulate, ameliorate, and diminish the slave-trade and the conditions of slavery itself – including, most boldly, the building of mission-cities on the African coast, to regulate and reduce the trade, to offer educational and economic opportunities to the locals, and so forth. Providing economic security and developed property to local tribes would surely (Burke thought) undercut their economic preference for the slave trade. After that, he turned to how to create a property-owning class of blacks in the West Indies, which was his solution both to vindicate the natural dignity of the slaves, but also to wither away the economic desire for slavery.
The key provisions were these:
(1) (a) younger slaves must have access to a school three days a week;
(b) that any who were particularly able should be emancipated at the cost of the crown, and sent to be educated to London to be educated til the age of twenty-four, or if their intelligence not be sufficient for academic pursuits, for them to be given a position in the trades as an apprentice, and later returned to the West Indies as a free black businessman;
(c) In a related measure, the protector of the slaves was able to emancipate technically skilled slaves and provide them with a craft living on the island itself.
(2) That marriage amongst slaves should be propagated, honoured, and rewarded as a route to freedom – as Burke put it, “a state of matrimony, and the government of a family, is a principal means of forming men to be a fitness for freedom, and to become good citizens”. On that basis:
(a) That common-law marriages should be recognised by a church marriage, opportunities for marriage actively advanced by slave-owners, and married men be given more time off;
(b) That families be protected from separation by sale, as happened so widely in the American South;
(c) That on top of a day and a half off a week guaranteed to every slave, married men and women with children should gain more and more free time as they get older;
(d) That masters must provide good houses for every family, and if the plantation were large enough, land as well for the family to maintain in their own right, free from any tithe to the slave-owner;
(e) That slaves should have the right to pass on an inheritance;
(f) That fathers may purchase the freedom of their families at 50% of market value.
Now we may react to these with the outrage of men and women of a different time, but I can only say that modern slavery is often quite as bad – just look to the Uighur camps of Sinkiang – and that its problems are often quite as intractable. Burke offered a way to produce a dignified, property-owning population out of those who had heretofore been seen as chattel. His code placed them rather in a position of indenture than outright slavery; he near-guaranteed the withering of the plantation system, by propagating a homestead system in its place; he provided a formal and approved route for Caribbean blacks to gain a higher education, and that in 1780.
What relevance has this for us, anyway? We must draw out the principles of Burke’s Irish and Negro advocacy: government support for stable families, enabling them to more easily accumulate property, incentivizing them to develop it, rewarding them for success; and the provision of educational opportunities of the highest quality.
Now, I must say this need not only apply to African-Americans, or the descendants of Windrush in the U.K. By many measures the most disadvantaged group in Britain is white working-class boys. This Burkean proposal might just as easily be made to them.
First we identify those groups which suffer from structural disadvantages – I do not mean the vague bogies of silent racism or cultural hegemony, but where people are born into poverty, heading for bad schools, and seemingly destined to bad outcomes. The key thing which will nurture the innate dignity of these people, lead to wider societal flourishing, and circumvent the present resurrection of Jacobinism, is property.
Not property via radical redistribution – where every property owner learns that property is as easily taken as gained, and incentives for success are severely depressed or perverted – but property via honourable accumulation, with assistance given for those who have not the early economic resources which accelerate such success. Nor ought this assistance come in the way of unmediated “seed money” or gestural reparations. It ought to be concrete and directed to provide multiple future generations with the agency of their own destiny, and therefore it must be cultivated like the vine.
First, we must provide the educational and trade opportunities that will expand the leadership and business classes of these disadvantaged groups. How many articulate, learned, dignified, rough-background North-Easterners do we have in British politics now? I have written elsewhere, and will write again, at how unfit our educational system (here, and I suspect mostly in the U.S.) is for providing real opportunity for excellence, whether for the rich or poor. We need new systems, new schools, new colleges, new trades schemes – but with enormous scholarship and training funds for those from poorer backgrounds.
We must build thousands of new urban schools, run on principles where children are not seen as either a problem of behaviour management, or a machine for achieving good grades, but instead schools that send out every boy a gentleman and every girl a lady, socially integrated and able to hold their own with those born to much greater privilege. We must guarantee training in plumbing or electrics or some other genuinely dignified and lucrative trade to any of these young people who show a willingness to apply themselves.
Second, we must incentivize marriage and faithful parenting, and provide opportunities for ownership, not renting. Let one hundred thousand urban homesteads flourish in the decayed remains of America’s inner cities, in the vast empty lots; tell poor young men and women that, like Adam and Eve, they may step into a garden rich and productive if they commit to their own dignity and each other.
Let our governments fund golden handshake retirements for the 50% of farmers about to age out of the business, and – rather than seeing Agribusiness buy more and more land and adulterate it further and further – enact new Homestead Acts. Let there be a direct relation between the revenue of corporation tax and the funding of business opportunities and the purchasing of vital equipment for young poor people seeking a start in business. Create competition at the expense of the oligarchic near-monopolies, by putting opportunity in the hands of the poor to innovate.
No freedom will come from Autonomous Zones; no peace will come from Radical Redistribution; no healthy constitution arises from the destruction and humiliation of the old. Since 1789 we have never seen a successful experiment along these lines. But perhaps the pragmatic, realistic, but visionary and bold principles of Burke may aid us.
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