WORKS.  There are three distinctly marked periods in Burke’s career, and these correspond closely to the years in which he was busied with the affairs of America, India, and France successively.  The first period was one of prophecy.  He had studied the history and temper of the American colonies, and he warned England of the disaster which must follow her persistence in ignoring the American demands, and especially the American spirit.  His great speeches, “On American Taxation” and “On Conciliation with America,” were delivered in 1774 and 1775, preceding the Declaration of Independence.  In this period Burke’s labor seemed all in vain; he lost his cause, and England her greatest colony.

The second period is one of denunciation rather than of prophecy.  England had won India; but when Burke studied the methods of her victory and understood the soulless way in which millions of poor natives were made to serve the interests of an English monopoly, his soul rose in revolt, and again he was the champion of an oppressed people.  His two greatest speeches of this period are “The Nabob of Arcot’s Debts” and his tremendous “Impeachment of Warren Hastings.”  Again he apparently lost his cause, though he was still fighting on the side of right.  Hastings was acquitted, and the spoliation of India went on; but the seeds of reform were sown, and grew and bore fruit long after Burke’s labors were ended.

The third period is, curiously enough, one of reaction.  Whether because the horrors of the French Revolution had frightened him with the danger of popular liberty, or because his own advance in office and power had made him side unconsciously with the upper classes, is unknown.  That he was as sincere and noble now as in all his previous life is not questioned.  He broke with the liberal Whigs and joined forces with the reactionary Tories.  He opposed the romantic writers, who were on fire with enthusiasm over the French Revolution, and thundered against the dangers which the revolutionary spirit must breed, forgetting that it was a revolution which had made modern England possible.  Here, where we must judge him to have been mistaken in his cause, he succeeded for the first time.  It was due largely to Burke’s influence that the growing sympathy for the French people was checked in England, and war was declared, which ended in the frightful victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo.

Burke’s best known work of this period is his Reflections on the French Revolution, which he polished and revised again Essay on and again before it was finally printed.  This ambitious literary essay, though it met with remarkable success, is a disappointment to the reader.  Though of Celtic blood, Burke did not understand the French, or the principles for which the common people were fighting in their own way[198]; and his denunciations and apostrophes to France suggest a preacher without humor, hammering away at sinners who are not present in his congregation.