Of all Burke’s writings none are so fit to secure unqualified and unanimous admiration as the three pieces on this momentous struggle:—­the Speech on American Taxation (April 19, 1774); the Speech on Conciliation with America (March 22, 1775); and the Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777).  Together they hardly exceed the compass of the little volume which the reader now has in his hands.  It is no exaggeration to say that they compose the most perfect manual in our literature, or in any literature, for one who approaches the study of public affairs, whether for knowledge or for practice.  They are an example without fault of all the qualities which the critic, whether a theorist or an actor, of great political situations should strive by night and by day to possess.  If the theme with which they deal were less near than it is to our interests and affections as free citizens, these three performances would still abound in the lessons of an incomparable political method.  If their subject were as remote as the quarrel between the Corinthians and Corcyra, or the war between Rome and the Allies, instead of a conflict to which the world owes the opportunity of the most important of political experiments, we should still have everything to learn from the author’s treatment; the vigorous grasp of masses of compressed detail, the wide illumination from great principles of human experience, the strong and masculine feeling for the two great political ends of Justice and Freedom, the large and generous interpretation of expediency, the morality, the vision, the noble temper.  If ever, in the fulness of time, and surely the fates of men and literature cannot have it otherwise, Burke becomes one of the half-dozen names of established and universal currency in education and in common books, rising above the waywardness of literary caprice or intellectual fashions, as Shakespeare and Milton and Bacon rise above it, it will be the mastery, the elevation, the wisdom, of these far-shining discourses in which the world will in an especial degree recognise the combination of sovereign gifts with beneficent uses.

The pamphlet on the Present Discontents is partially obscured or muffled to the modern reader by the space which is given to the cabal of the day.  The Reflections on the French Revolution over-abounds in declamation, and—­apart from its being passionately on one side, and that perhaps the wrong one—­the splendour of the eloquence is out of proportion to the reason and the judgment.  In the pieces on the American war, on the contrary, Burke was conscious that he could trust nothing to the sympathy or the prepossessions of his readers, and this put him upon an unwonted persuasiveness.  Here it is reason and judgment, not declamation; lucidity, not passion; that produces the effects of eloquence.  No choler mars the page; no purple patch distracts our minds from the penetrating force of argument; no commonplace is dressed up into a vague sublimity.  The cause of freedom is made to wear its own proper robe of equity, self-control, and reasonableness.