No More Learning

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EDMU URTE.


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2779
EDMUND BURKE
(1729-1797)
BY E. L. GODKIN
ES
DMUND BURKE, born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1729, was the son
of a successful attorney, who gave him as good an educa-
tion as the times and the country afforded. He went to
school to an excellent Quaker, and graduated at Trinity College in
1748. He appears to have then gone to London in 1750 to keep
terms,” as it was called, at the Middle Temple, with the view of
being admitted to the bar, in obedience to his father's desire and
ambition. But the desultory habit of mind, the preference for lit-
erature and philosophical speculation to connected study, which had
marked his career in college, followed him and prevented any seri-
ous application to the law. His father's patience was after a while
exhausted, and he withdrew Burke's allowance and left him to his
own resources.
This was in 1755, but in 1756 he married, and made his first
appearance in the literary world by the publication of a book.
About these years from 1750 to 1759 little is known. He published
two works, one a treatise on the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful, and the other a Vindication of Natural Society,' a
satire on Bolingbroke. Stray allusions and anecdotes about other
men in the diaries and correspondence of the time show that he
frequented the literary coffee-houses, and was gradually making an
impression on the authors and wits whom he met there. Besides the
two books we have mentioned, he produced some smaller things,
such as an Essay on the Drama,' and part of an Abridgment of
the History of England. But although these helped to secure him
admission to the literary set, they did not raise him out of the rank
of obscure literary adventurers, who from the Revolution of 1688,
and especially after the union with Scotland, began to swarm to
London from all parts of the three kingdoms. The first recognition
of him as a serious writer was his employment by Dodsley the book-
seller, at a salary of $100 a year, to edit the Annual Register, which
Dodsley founded in 1769. Considered as a biographical episode, this
may fairly be treated as a business man's certificate that Burke was
industrious and accurate. As his income from his father was with-
drawn or reduced in 1755, there remain four years during which his
way of supporting himself is unknown. His published works were


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2780
EDMUND BURKE
reasons.
certainly not “pot-boilers. ” He was probably to some extent de-
pendent on his wife's father, Dr. Nugent, an Irish physician who
when Burke made his acquaintance lived in Bath, but after his
daughter's marriage settled in London, and seems to have frequented
and have been acceptable in the same coffee-houses as Burke, and
for the same
But Burke was not a man to remain long
dependent on any one. These nine years were evidently not spent
fruitlessly. They had made him known and brought him to the
threshold of public life.
In 1759, political discussion as we understand it—that is, those
explorations of the foundations of political society and analyses of
social relations which now form our daily intellectual food — was
hardly known. The interest in religion as the chief human concern
was rapidly declining. The interest in human society as an organism
to be studied, and if need be, taken to pieces and put together again,
was only just beginning. Montesquieu's great work, The Spirit of
the Laws,' which demanded for expediency and convenience in legis-
lation the place which modern Europe had long assigned to authority,
had only appeared in 1748. Swift's satires had made serious breaches
in the wall of convention by which the State, in spite of the convul-
sions of the seventeenth century, was still surrounded. But the
writer whose speculations excited most attention in England was
Bolingbroke. The charm of his style and the variety of his interests
made him the chief intellectual topic of the London world in Burke's
early youth. To write like Bolingbroke was a legitimate ambition for
a young man. It is not surprising that Burke felt it, and that his
earliest political effort was a satire on Boling broke. It attracted the
attention of a politician, Gerard Hamilton, and he quickly picked up
Burke as his secretary, treated him badly, and was abandoned by
him in disgust at the end of six years.
The peculiar condition of the English governmental machine made
possible for men of Burke's kind at this period what would not be
possible now. The population had vanished from a good many old
boroughs, although their representation in Parliament remained, and
the selection of the members fell to the lords of the soil.
About one
hundred and fifty members of the House of Commons were in this
way chosen by great landed proprietors, and it is to be said to their
credit that they used their power freely to introduce unknown young
men of talent into public life. Moreover in many cases, if not in
most, small boroughs, however well peopled, were expected to elect
the proprietor's nominee. Burke after leaving Hamilton's service
was for a short time private secretary to Lord Rockingham, when
the latter succeeded Grenville in the Ministry in 1766; but when he
went out, Burke obtained a seat in Parliament in 1765 in the manner


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EDMUND BURKE
2781
we have described, for the borough of Wendover, from Lord Verney,
who owned it. He made his first successful speech the same year,
and was complimented by Pitt. He was already recognized as a man
of enormous information, as any one who edited the Annual Register
had to be.
A man of such powers and tastes in that day naturally became a
pamphleteer. Outside of Parliament there was no other mode of dis-
cussing public affairs. The periodical press for purposes of discussion
did not exist. During and after the Great Rebellion, the pamphlet
had made its appearance as the chief instrument of controversy.
Defoe used it freely after the Restoration. Swift made a great hit
with it, and probably achieved the first sensational sale with his
pamphlet on The Conduct of the Allies. Bolingbroke's Patriot
King' was a work of the same class. As a rule the pamphlet ex-
posed or refuted somebody, even if it also freely expounded. It was
inevitable that Burke should early begin to wield this most powerful
of existing weapons. His antagonist was ready for him in the per-
son of George Grenville, the minister who had made way for Burke's
friend and patron Lord Rockingham. Grenville showed, as easily
as any party newspaper in our own day, that Rockingham and his
friends had ruined the country by mismanagement of the war and of
the finances. Burke refuted him with a mastery of facts and figures,
and a familiarity with the operations of trade and commerce, and a
power of exposition and illustration, and a comprehension of the
fundamental conditions of national economy, which at once made him
famous and a necessary man for the Whigs in the great struggle
with the Crown on which they were entering.
The nature of this struggle cannot be better described in brief
space than by saying that the King, from his accession to the throne
down to the close of the American War, was engaged in a persistent
effort to govern through ministers chosen and dismissed, as the Ger-
man ministers are now, by himself; while the subservience of Parlia-
ment was secured by the profuse use of pensions and places. To
this attempt, and all the abuses which inevitably grew out of it, the
- Whigs with Burke as their intellectual head offered a determined
resistance, and the conflict was one extraordinarily well calculated to
bring his peculiar powers into play.
The leading events in this long struggle were the attempt of the
House of Commons to disqualify Wilkes for a seat in the House, to
punish reporting their debates as a breach of privilege, and the
prosecution of the war against the American colonies. It may be
said to have begun at the accession of the King, and to have lasted
until the resignation of Lord North after the surrender of Cornwallis,
or from 1770 to 1783.


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2782
EDMUND BURKE
Burke's contributions to it were his pamphlet, (Thoughts on the
Cause of the Present Discontents,' and several speeches in Parlia-
ment: the first, like the pamphlet, on the general situation, and
others on minor incidents in the struggle. This pamphlet has not
only survived the controversy, but has become one of the most
famous papers in the political literature of the Anglo-Saxon race. It
is a century since every conspicuous figure in the drama passed
away; it is seventy years since every trace of the controversy dis-
appeared from English political life; most if not all of the principles
for which Burke contended have become commonplaces of English
constitutional practice; the discontents of that day have vanished as
completely as those of 1630: but Burke's pamphlet still holds a high
place in every course of English literature, and is still read and
pondered by every student of constitutional history and by every
speculator on government and political morals.
In 1774 Parliament was dissolved for the second time since Burke
entered it; and there a misfortune overtook him which illustrated in
a striking way the practical working of the British Constitution at
that period. Lord Verney, to whom he had owed his seat for the
borough of Wendover at two elections, had fallen into pecuniary
embarrassment and could no longer return him, because compelled
to sell his four boroughs. This left Burke high and dry, and he was
beginning to tremble for his political future, when he was returned
for the great commercial city of Bristol by a popular constituency.
The six years during which he sat for Bristol were the most splen-
did portion of his career. Other portions perhaps contributed as
much if not more to his literary or oratorical reputation; but this
brought out in very bold relief the great traits of character which
will always endear his memory to the lovers of national liberty, and
place him high among the framers of great political ideals. In the
first place, he propounded boldly to the Bristol electors the theory
that he was to be their representative but not their delegate; that
his parliamentary action must be governed by his own reason and
not by their wishes. In the next, he resolutely sacrificed his seat by
opposing his constituents in supporting the removal of the restric-
tions on Irish trade, of which English merchants reaped the benefit.
He would not be a party to what he considered the oppression of
his native country, no matter what might be the effect on his politi-
cal prospects; and in 1780 he was not re-elected.
But the greatest achievement of this period of his history was his
share in the controversy over the American War, which was really
not more a conflict with the colonies over taxation, than a resolute
and obstinate carrying out of the King's principles of government.
The colonies were, for the time being, simply resisting pretensions


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EDMUND BURKE
2783
a
to which the kingdom at home submitted. Burke's speeches on
(American Taxation (1774), on Conciliation with America (1775),
and his "Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777) on the same sub-
ject, taken as a sequel to the Thoughts on the Present Discontents,'
form a body of literature which it is not too much to pronounce not
only a history of the dispute with the colcnies, but a veritable politi-
cal manual. He does not confine himself to a minute description of
the arguments used in supporting the attempt to coerce America; he
furnishes as he goes along principles of legislation applicable almost
to any condition of society; illustrations which light up as by a sin-
gle flash problems of apparently inscrutable darkness; explanations
of great political failures; and receipts innumerable for political hap-
piness and success. A single sentence often disposes of half a dozen
fallacies firmly imbedded in governmental tradition. His own de-
scription of the rhetorical art of Charles Townshend was eminently
applicable to himself:— "He knew, better by far than any man I
ever was acquainted with, how to bring together within a short time
all that was necessary to establish, to illustrate, and to decorate that
side of the question which he supported. ”
This observation suggests the great advantage he derives as
political instructor from the facts that all his political speeches and
writings are polemical. The difficulty of keeping exposition from
being dry is familiar to everybody who has ever sought to commu-
nicate knowledge on any subject. But Burke in every one of his
political theses had an antagonist, who was literally as he says him-
self, a helper: who did the work of an opposing counsel at the bar,
in bringing out into prominence all the weak points of Burke's case
and all the strong ones of his own; who set in array all the fallacies
to be exposed, all the idols to be overthrown, all the doubts to be
cleared up. Moreover he was not, like the man who usually figures
in controversial dialogues, a sham opponent, but a creature of flesh
and blood like Grenville, or the Sheriffs of Bristol, or the King's
friends, or the Irish Protestant party, who met Burke with an ardor
not inferior to his own. We consequently have, in all his papers
and speeches, the very best of which he was capable in thought and
expression, for he had not only to watch the city but to meet the
enemy in the gate.
After the close of the American War, the remainder of Burke's
career was filled with two great subjects, to which he devoted him-
self with an ardor which occasionally degenerated into fanaticism.
One was the government of India by the East India Company, and
the other was the French Revolution. Although the East India
Company had been long in existence, and had towards the middle
of the eighteenth century been rapidly extending its power and


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2784
EDMUND BURKE
influence, comparatively little had been known by the English public
of the nature of its operations. Attention had been drawn away
from it by the events in America and the long contest with the
King in England. By the close of the American War, however, the
“Nabobs, as they were called, -or returned English adventurers, —
began to make a deep impression on English society by the appar-
ent size of their fortunes and the lavishness of their expenditure.
Burke calculated that in his time they had brought home about
$200,000,000, with which they bought estates and seats in Parliament
and became a very conspicuous element in English public and pri-
vate life. At the same time, information as to the mode in which
their money was made and their government carried on was scanty
and hard to acquire. The press had no foreign correspondence;
India was six months away, and all the Europeans in it were either
servants of the Company, or remained in it on the Company's suf-
ferance. The Whigs finally determined to attempt a grand inquisi-
tion into its affairs, and a bill was brought in by Fox, withdrawing
the government of India from the Company and vesting it in a com-
mission named in the bill. This was preceded by eleven reports
from a Committee of Inquiry. But the bill failed utterly, and
brought down the Whig ministry, which did not get into office again
in Burke's time. This was followed in 1985, on Burke's instigation,
by the impeachment of the most conspicuous of the Company's offi-
cers, Warren Hastings. Burke was appointed one of the managers
on behalf of the Commons.
No episode in his career is so familiar to the public as his con-
duct of this trial, owing to Warren Hastings having been the subject
of one of the most popular of Macaulay's Essays. None brought out
more clearly Burke's great dialectical powers, or so well displayed
his mastery of details and his power of orderly exposition. The
trial lasted eight years, and was adjourned over from one Parlia-
mentary session to another. These delays were fatal to its success.
The public interest in it died out long before the close, as usual ir.
protracted legal prosecutions; the feeling spread that the defendant
could not be very guilty when it took so long to prove his crime.
Although Burke toiled over the case with extraordinary industry and
persistence, and an enthusiasm which never flagged, Hastings was
finally acquitted.
But the labors of the prosecution were not wholly vain. It awoke
in England an attention to the government of India which never
died out, and led to a considerable curtailing of the power of the
East India Company, and necessarily of its severity, in dealing with
Indian States. The impeachment was preceded by eleven reports
on the affairs of India by the Committee of the House of Commons,


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EDMUND BURKE
2785
and the articles of impeachment were nearly as voluminous. Prob-
ably no question which has ever come before Parliament has received
so thorough an examination. Hardly less important was the report
of the Committee of the Commons (which consisted of the managers
of the impeachment) on the Lords' journals. This was an elaborate
examination of the rules of evidence which govern proceedings in
the trial of impeachments, or of persons guilty of malfeasance in
office. This has long been a bone of contention between lawyers
and statesmen. The Peers in the course of the trial had taken the
opinion of the judges frequently, and had followed it in deciding on
the admissibility of evidence, a great deal of which was important to
the prosecution. The report maintained, and with apparently un-
answerable force, that when a legislature sits on offenses against the
State, it constitutes a grand inquest which makes its own rules of
evidence; and is not and ought not to be tied up by the rules
administered in the ordinary law courts, and formed for the most
part for the guidance of the unskilled and often uneducated men
who compose juries. As a manual for the instruction of legislative
committees of inquiry it is therefore still very valuable, if it be not
a final authority.
Burke, during and after the Warren Hastings trial, fell into con-
siderable neglect and unpopularity. His zeal in the prosecution had
grown as the public interest in it declined, until it approached the
point of fanaticism. He took office in the coalition which succeeded
the Fox Whigs, and when the French Revolution broke out it found
him somewhat broken in nerves, irritated by his failures, and in less
cordial relations with some of his old friends and colleagues. He at
once arrayed himself fiercely against the Revolution, and broke finally
with what might be called the Liberty of all parties and creeds, and
stood forth to the world as the foremost champion of authority, pre-
scription, and precedent. Probably none of his writings are so famil-
iar to the general public as those which this crisis produced, such as
the “Thoughts on the French Revolution) and the Letters on
Regicide Peace. They are and will always remain, apart from the
splendor of the rhetoric, extremely interesting as the last words
spoken by a really great man on behalf of the old order. Old
Europe made through him the best possible defense of itself. He
told, as no one else could have told it, the story of what customs,
precedent, prescription, and established usage had done for its civ-
ilization; and he told it nevertheless as who was the friend
of rational progress, and had taken no small part in promoting it.
Only one other writer who followed him came near equaling him as
a defender of the past, and that was Joseph de Maistre; but he
approached the subject mainly from the religious side. To him the
old régime was the order of Providence. To Burke it was the best
VII-175
a
one


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EDMUND BURKE
scheme of things that humanity could devise for the advancement
and preservation of civilization. In the papers we have mentioned,
which were the great literary sensations of Burke's day, everything
that could be said for the system of political ethics under which
Europe had lived for a thousand years was said with a vigor, in-
cisiveness, and wealth of illustration which must make them for all
time and in all countries the arsenal of those who love the ancient
ways and dread innovation.
The failure of the proceedings against Warren Hastings, and the
strong sympathy with the French Revolution - at least in its begin-
ning – displayed by the Whigs and by most of those with whom
Burke had acted in politics, had an unfortunate effect on his temper.
He broke off his friendship with Fox and others of his oldest associ-
ates and greatest admirers. He became hopeless and out of conceit
with the world around him. One might have set down some of this
at least to the effect of advancing years and declining health, if such
onslaughts on revolutionary ideas as his Reflections on the French
Revolution and his Letters on a Regicide Peace) did not reveal
the continued possession of all the literary qualities which had made
the success of his earlier works. Their faults are literally the faults
of youth: the brilliancy of the rhetoric, the heat of the invective,
the violence of the partisanship, the reluctance to admit the exist-
ence of any grievances in France to justify the popular onslaught on
the monarchy, the noblesse, and the Church. His one explanation of
the crisis and its attendant horrors was the instigation of the spirit
of evil. The effect on contemporary opinion was very great, and
did much to stimulate the conservative reaction in England which
carried on the Napoleonic wars and lasted down to the passage of
the Reform Bill in 1832.
There were, however, other causes for the cloud which came
over Burke's later years. In spite of his great services to his party
and his towering eminence as an orator and writer, he never ob-
tained a seat in the Cabinet. The Paymastership of the Forces, at a
salary of $20,000 a year, was the highest reward, either in honor or
money, which his party ever bestowed on him. It is true that in
those days the Whigs were very particular in reserving high places
for men of rank and family. In fact, their government was, from
the Revolution of 1688 on, a thorough oligarchy, divided among a
few great houses. That they should not have broken through this
rule in Burke's case, and admitted to the Cabinet a man to whom
they owed so much as they did to him, excited wonder in his own
day, and has down to our own time been one of the historical
mysteries on which the students of that period love to expend
their ingenuity. It is difficult to reconcile this exclusion and neg-
lect of Burke with the unbounded admiration lavished on him by the


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EDMUND BURKE
2787
aristocratic leaders of the party. It is difficult too to account for
Burke's quiet acquiescence in what seems to be their ingratitude.
There had before his time been no similar instance of party indif-
ference to such claims as he could well make, on such honors and
rewards as the party had to bestow.
The most probable explanation of the affair is the one offered by
his latest and ablest biographer, Mr. John Morley. Burke had entered
public life without property,– probably the most serious mistake, if
in his case it can be called a mistake, which an English politician
can commit. It is a wise and salutary rule of English public life
that a
man who seeks a political career shall qualify for it by
pecuniary independence. It would be hardly fair in Burke's case
to say that he had sought a political career. The greatness of his
talents literally forced it on him. He became a statesman and
great Parliamentary orator, so to speak, in spite of himself. But he
must have early discovered the great barrier to complete success
created by his poverty. He may be said to have passed his life in
pecuniary embarrassment. This alone might not have shut him out
from the Whig official Paradise, for the same thing might have been
said of Pitt and Fox: but they had connections; they belonged by
birth and association to the Whig class. Burke's relatives were no
help or credit to him. In fact, they excited distrust of him. They
offended the fastidious aristocrats with whom he associated, and com-
bined with his impecuniousness to make him seem unsuitable for a
great place. These aristocrats were very good to him. They lent
him money freely, and settled a pension on him, and covered him
with social adulation; but they were never willing to put him beside
themselves in the government. His latter years therefore had an air
of tragedy. He was unpopular with most of those who in his earlier
years had adored him, and was the hero of those whom in earlier
years he had despised.
l
His only son, of whose capacity he had
formed a strange misconception, died young, and he passed his own
closing hours, as far as we can judge, with a sense of failure. But
he left one of the great names in English history. / There is no trace
of him in the statute book, but he has, it is safe to say, exercised a
profound influence in all succeeding legislation, both in England and
America. He has inspired or suggested nearly all the juridical
changes which distinguish the England of to-day from the England
of the last century, and is probably the only British politician whose
speeches and pamphlets, made for immediate results, have given him
immortality.
E. L. Godkin


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2788
EDMUND BURKE
FROM THE SPEECH ON (CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA
S'R:
IR. -It is not a pleasant consideration; but nothing in the
world can read so awful and so instructive a lesson as the
conduct of the Ministry in this business, upon the mischief
of not having large and liberal ideas in the management of great
affairs. Never have the servants of the State looked at the whole
of your complicated interests in one connected view. They have
taken things by bits and scraps, some at one time and one pre-
tense and some at another, just as they pressed, without any
sort of regard to their relations or dependencies. They never
had any kind of system, right or wrong; but only invented oc-
casionally some 'miserable tale for the day, in order meanly
to sneak out of difficulties into which they had proudly strutted.
And they were put to all these shifts and devices, full of mean-
ness and full of mischief, in order to pilfer piecemeal a repeal of
an act which they had not the generous courage, when they found
and felt their error, honorably and fairly to disclaim. By such
management, by the irresistible operation of feeble counsels, so
paltry a sum as Threepence in the eyes of a financier, so insignifi-
cant an article as Tea in the eyes of a philosopher, have shaken
the pillars of a commercial empire that circled the whole globe.
Do you forget that in the very last year you stood on the
precipice of general bankruptcy? Your danger was indeed great.
You were distressed in the affairs of the East India Company;
and you well know what sort of things are involved in the com-
prehensive energy of that significant appellation. I am not called
upon to enlarge to you on that danger; which you thought proper
yourselves to aggravate, and to display to the world with all the
parade of indiscreet declamation. The monopoly of the most lucra-
tive trades and the possession of imperial revenues had brought
you to the verge of beggary and ruin.
Such was your repre-
sentation — such, in some measure, was your case.
The vent of
ten millions of pounds of this commodity, now locked up by the
operation of an injudicious tax and rotting in the warehouses of
the company, would have prevented all this distress, and all that
series of desperate measures which you thought yourselves obliged
to take in consequence of it. America would have furnished that
vent which no other part of the world can furnish but America,
where tea is next to a necessary of life and where the demand


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EDMUND BURKE
2789
.
grows upon the supply. I hope our dear-bought East India Com-
mittees have done us at least so much good as to let us know
that without a more extensive sale of that article, our East India
revenues and acquisitions can have no certain connection with
this country.
It is through the American trade of tea that your
East India conquests are to be prevented from crushing you with
their burden. They are ponderous indeed, and they must have
that great country to lean upon, or they tumble upon your head.
It is the same folly that has lost you at once the benefit of the
West and of the East. This folly has thrown open folding-doors
to contraband, and will be the means of giving the profits of the
trade of your colonies to every nation but yourselves. Never did
a people suffer so much for the empty words of a preamble. It
must be given up. For on what principles does it stand? This
famous revenue stands, at this hour, on all the debate, as a de-
scription of revenue not as yet known in all the comprehensive
(but too comprehensive! ) vocabulary of finance-a preambulary
tar. It is indeed a tax of sophistry, a tax of pedantry, a tax of
disputation, a tax of war and rebellion, a tax for anything but
benefit to the imposers or satisfaction to the subject.
Could anything be a subject of more just alarm to America
than to see you go out of the plain high-road of finance, and
give up your most certain revenues and your clearest interests,
merely for the sake of insulting your colonies ? No man ever
doubted that the commodity of tea could bear an imposition of
threepence. But no commodity will bear threepence, or will
bear a penny, when the general feelings of men are irritated; and
two millions of people are resolved not to pay.
The feelings of
the colonies were formerly the feelings of Great Britain. Theirs
were formerly the feelings of Mr. Hampden when called upon
for the payment of twenty shillings. Would twenty shillings
have ruined Mr. Hampden's fortune ? No! but the payment of
half twenty shillings, on the principle it was demanded, would
have made him a slave. It is the weight of that preamble of
which you are so fond, and not the weight of the duty, that the
Americans are unable and unwilling to bear.
It is then, sir, upon the principle of this measure, and noth-
ing else, that we at issue. It is a principle of political
expediency. Your Act of 1767 asserts that it is expedient to raise
a revenue in America; your Act of 1769, which takes away that
revenue, contradicts the Act of 1767, and by something much
are


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2790
EDMUND BURKE
a
stronger than words asserts that it is not expedient.
It is a
reflection upon your wisdom to persist in a solemn Parliamentary
declaration of the expediency of any object for which at the same
time you make no sort of provision. And pray, sir, let not this
circumstance escape you,- it is very material: that the preamble of
this Act which we wish to repeal is not declaratory of a right,
as some gentlemen seem to argue it; it is only a recital of the
cxpedicncy of a certain exercise of a right supposed already to
have been asserted; an exercise you are now contending for by
ways and means which you confess, though they were obeyed, to
be utterly insufficient for their purpose. You are therefore at
this moment in the awkward situation of fighting for a phantom,
a quiddity, a thing that wants not only a substance, but even
name; for a thing which is neither abstract right nor profitable
enjoyment.
They tell you, sir, that your dignity is tied to it. I know
not how it happens, but this dignity of yours is a terrible incum-
brance to you; for it has of late been ever at war with your
interest, your equity, and every idea of your policy. Show the
thing you contend for to be reason; show it to be common-sense;
show it to be the means of attaining some useful end: and then
I am content to allow it what dignity you please. But what
dignity is derived from the perseverance in absurdity, is more
than ever I could discern. The honorable gentleman has said
well - indeed, in most of his general observations I agree with
him -- he says that this subject does not stand as it did for-
merly. Oh, certainly not! Every hour you continue on this
ill-chosen ground, your difficulties thicken on you; and therefore
my conclusion is, remove from a bad position as quickly as you
The disgrace and the necessity of yielding, both of them,
grow upon you every hour of your delay.
To restore order and repose to an empire so great and so
distracted as ours, is, merely in the attempt, an undertaking that
would ennoble the flights of the highest genius and obtain par.
don for the efforts of the meanest understanding. Struggling a
good while with these thoughts, by degrees I felt myself more
firm. I derived at length some confidence from what in other
circumstances usually produces timidity. I grew less anxious,
even from the idea of my own insignificance. For, judging of
what you are by what you ought to be, I persuaded myself that
you would not reject a reasonable proposition because it had
can.


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EDMUND BURKE
2791
nothing but its reason to recommend it. On the other hand,
being totally destitute of all shadow of influence, natural or
adventitious, I was very sure that if my proposition were futile
or dangerous, if it were weakly conceived or improperly timed,
there was nothing exterior to it of power to awe, dazzle, or
delude you.
You will see it just as it is; and you will treat it
just as it deserves.
The proposition is Peace. Not Peace through the medium of
War; not Peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate
and endless negotiations; not Peace to arise out of universal dis-
cord, fomented from principle in all parts of the empire; not
Peace to depend on the juridical determination of perplexing
questions, or the precise marking of the shadowy boundaries of a
complex government. It is simple Peace, sought in its natural
course and in its ordinary haunts. It is Peace sought in the
spirit of Peace, and laid in principles purely pacific. I propose
by removing the ground of the difference, and by restoring the
former unsuspecting confidence of the colonies in the mother coun-
try, to give permanent satisfaction to your people; and (far from
a scheme of ruling by discord) to reconcile them to each other in
the same act and by the bond of the very same interest which
reconciles them to British government.
My idea is nothing more. Refined policy ever has been the
parent of confusion, and ever will be so, as long as the world
endures. Plain good intention, which is as easily discovered at
the first view as fraud is surely detected at last, is, let me say, of
no mean force in the government of mankind. Genuine simplicity
of heart is an healing and cementing principle. My plan, there-
fore, being formed upon the most simple grounds imaginable,
may disappoint some people when they hear it. It has nothing
to recommend it to the pruriency of curious ears. There is
nothing at all new and captivating in it. It has nothing of the
splendor of the project which has been lately laid upon your table
by the noble lord in the blue ribbon. It does not propose to fill
your lobby with squabbling colony agents, who will require the
interposition of your mace at every instant to keep the peace
amongst them. It does not institute a magnificent auction of
finance, where captivated provinces come to general ransom by
bidding against each other, until you knock down the hammer,
and determine a proportion of payments beyond all the powers
of algebra to equalize and settle.


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2792
EDMUND BURKE
The plan which I shall presume to suggest derives, however,
one great advantage from the proposition and registry of that
noble lord's project. The idea of conciliation is admissible.
First, the House, in accepting the resolution moved by the noble
lord, has admitted -- notwithstanding the menacing front of our
address, notwithstanding our heavy bills of pains and penalties
— that we do not think ourselves precluded from all ideas of
free grace and bounty.
The House has gone further: it has declared conciliation ad-
missible, previous to any submission on the part of America. It
has even shot a good deal beyond that mark, and has admitted
that the complaints of our former mode of exerting the right of
taxation were not wholly unfounded. That right, thus exerted,
is allowed to have something reprehensible in it — something un-
wise, or something grievous: since in the midst of our heat and
resentment we of ourselves have proposed a capital alteration,
and in order to get rid of what seemed so very exceptionable
have instituted a mode that is altogether new; one that is in-
deed wholly alien from all the ancient methods and forms of
Parliament.
The principle of this proceeding is large enough for my pur-
pose. The means proposed by the noble lord for carrying his
ideas into execution, I think indeed are very indifferently suited
to the end; and this I shall endeavor to show you before I sit
down. But for the present I take my ground on the admitted
principle. I mean to give peace. Peace implies reconciliation;
and where there has been a material dispute, reconciliation does
in a manner always imply concession on the one part or on the
other. In this state of things I make no difficulty in affirming
that the proposal ought to originate from us. Great and ac-
knowledged force is not impaired, either in effect or in opinion,
by an unwillingness to exert itself. The superior power may
offer peace with honor and safety. Such an offer from such a
power will be attributed to magnanimity. But the concessions
of the weak are the concessions of fear. When such a one is
disarmed, he is wholly at the mercy of his superior, and he loses
forever that time and those chances which, as they happen to
all men, are the strength and resources of all inferior power.
The capital leading questions on which you must this day
decide are these two: First, whether you ought to concede; and
secondly, what your concession ought to be. On the first of


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EDMUND BURKE
2793
these questions we have gained (as I have just taken the liberty
of observing to you) some ground. But I am sensible that a
good deal more is still to be done. Indeed, sir, to enable us to
determine both on the one and the other of these great questions
with a firm and precise judgment, I think it may be necessary to
consider distinctly the true nature and the peculiar circumstances
of the object which we have before us. Because after all our
struggle, whether we will or not, we must govern America
according to that nature and to those circumstances, and not
according to our own imaginations nor according to abstract ideas
of right; by no means according to mere general theories of gov-
ernment, the resort to which appears to me, in our present situa-
tion, no better than arrant trifling. I shall therefore endeavor,
with your leave, to lay before you some of the most material of
these circumstances in as full and as clear a manner as I am
able to state them.
FROM THE SPEECH ON (THE NABOB OF ARCOT'S DEBTS)
THAT
HAT you may judge what chance any honorable and useful
end of government has for a provision that comes in for
the leavings of these gluttonous demands, I must take it
on myself to bring before you the real condition of that abused,
insulted, racked, and ruined country, though in truth my mind
revolts from it; though you will hear it with horror: and I con-
fess I tremble when I think on these awful and confounding
dispensations of Providence. I shall first trouble you with a few
words as to the cause.
The great fortunes made in India in the beginnings of con-
quest naturally excited an emulation in all the parts, and through
the whole succession, of the company's service. But in the com-
pany it gave rise to other sentiments. They did not find the
new channels of acquisition flow with equal riches to them. On
the contrary, the high flood-tide of private emolument was gen-
erally in the lowest ebb of their affairs. They began also to fear
that the fortune of war might take away what the fortune of
war had given. Wars were accordingly discouraged by repeated
injunctions and menaces; and that the servants might not be
bribed into them by the native princes, they were strictly for-
bidden to take any money whatsoever from their hands. But


## p. 2794 (#366) ###########################################

2794
EDMUND BURKE
vehement passion is ingenious in resources. The company's
servants were not only stimulated but better instructed by the
prohibition. They soon fell upon a contrivance which answered
their purposes far better than the methods which were forbidden;
though in this also they violated an ancient, but they thought an
abrogated, order. They reversed their proceedings. Instead of
receiving presents, they made loans. Instead of carrying on
wars in their own name, they contrived an authority, at once
irresistible and irresponsible, in whose name they might rav-
age at pleasure; and being thus freed from all restraint, they
indulged themselves in the most extravagant speculations of
plunder. The cabal of creditors who have been the object of
the late bountiful grant from His Majesty's ministers, in order
to possess themselves, under the name of creditors and assignees,
of every country in India as fast as it should be conquered,
inspired into the mind of the Nabob of Arcot (then a dependant
on the company of the humblest order) a scheme of the most
wild and desperate ambition that I believe ever was admitted
into the thoughts of a man so situated. First, they persuaded
him to consider himself as a principal member in the political
system of Europe. In the next place they held out to him, and
he readily imbibed, the idea of the general empire of Indostan.
As a preliminary to this undertaking, they prevailed on him to
propose a tripartite division of that vast country — one part to
the company; another to the Mahrattas; and the third to him-
self. To himself he reserved all the southern part of the great
peninsula, comprehended under the general name of the Deccan.
On this scheme of their servants, the company was to appear
in the Carnatic in no other light than as a contractor for the
provision of armies and hire of mercenaries, for his use and
under his direction. This disposition was to be secured by the
Nabob's putting himself under the guarantee of France, and by
the means of that rival nation preventing the English forever
from assuming an equality, much less a superiority, in the Car-
natic. In pursuance of this treasonable project (treasonable on
the part of the English), they extinguished the company as a
sovereign power in that part of India; they withdrew the com-
pany's garrisons out of all the forts and strongholds of the Car-
natic; they declined to receive the ambassadors from foreign
courts, and remitted them to the Nabob of Arcot; they fell
upon, and totally destroyed, the oldest ally of the company, the


## p. 2795 (#367) ###########################################

EDMUND BURKE
2795
king 'of Tanjore, and plundered the country to the amount of
near five millions sterling; one after another, in the Nabob's
name but with English force, they brought into a miserable
servitude all the princes and great independent nobility of a vast
country. In proportion to these treasons and violences, which
ruined the people, the fund of the Nabob's debt grew and flour-
ished.
Among the victims to this magnificent plan of universal plun-
der, worthy of the heroic avarice of the projectors, you have all
heard (and he has made himself to be well remembered) of an
Indian chief called Hyder Ali Khan. This man possessed the
western, as the company under the name of the Nabob of Arcot
does the eastern, division of the Carnatic. It was among the
leading measures in the design of this cabal (according to their
own emphatic language) to ertir pate this Hyder Ali.
Hyder Ali. They
declared the Nabob of Arcot to be his sovereign, and himself
to be a rebel, and publicly invested their instrument with the
sovereignty of the kingdom of Mysore. But their victim was
not of the passive kind. They were soon obliged to conclude a
treaty of peace and close alliance with this rebel at the gates
of Madras. Both before and since that treaty, every principle of
policy pointed out this power as a natural alliance; and on his
part it was courted by every sort of amicable office. But the
cabinet council of English creditors would not suffer their Nabob
of Arcot to sign the treaty, nor even to give to a prince at
least his equal the ordinary titles of respect and courtesy.
From that time forward, a continued plot was carried on within
the divan, black and white, of the Nabob of Arcot, for the
destruction of Hyder Ali. As to the outward members of the
double, or rather treble, government of Madras, which had
signed the treaty, they were always prevented by some over-
ruling influence (which they do not describe but which cannot
be misunderstood) from performing what justice and interest
combined so evidently to enforce.
When at length Hyder Ali found that he had to do with men
who either would sign no convention, or whom no treaty and no
signature could bind, and who were the determined enemies of
human intercourse itself, he decreed to make the country pos-
sessed by these incorrigible and predestinated criminals a mem-
orable example to mankind. He resolved, in the gloomy recesses
of a mind capacious of such things, to leave the whole Carnatic


## p. 2796 (#368) ###########################################

2796
EDMUND BURKE
an everlasting monument of vengeance, and to put perpetual
desolation as a barrier between him and those against whom the
faith which holds the moral elements of the world together was
no protection. He became at length so confident of his force, so
collected in his might, that he made no secret whatsoever of his
dreadful resolution. Having terminated his disputes with every
enemy and every rival, who buried their mutual animosities in
their common detestation against the creditors of the Nabob of
Arcot, he drew from every quarter whatever a savage ferocity
could add to his new rudiments in the arts of destruction; and
compounding all the materials of fury, havoc, and desolation into
one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities of the
mountains. Whilst the authors of all these evils were idly and
stupidly gazing on this menacing meteor, which blackened all
their horizon, it suddenly burst and poured down the whole of
its contents upon the plains of the Carnatic. Then ensued a
scene of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart con-
ceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrors
of war before known or heard of were mercy to that new havoc.
A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every
house, destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants, flying
from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others,
without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank, or sacred-
ness of function,-- fathers torn from children, husbands from
wives, -enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the
goading spears of drivers and the trampling of pursuing horses,
were swept into captivity in an unknown and hostile land.
Those who were able to evade this tempest fled to the walled
cities: but escaping from fire, sword, and exile; they fell into
the jaws of famine.
The alms of the settlement in this dreadful exigency were
certainly liberal, and all was done by charity that private charity
could do: but it was a people in beggary; it was a nation which
stretched out its hands for food. For months together these
creatures of sufferance, — whose very excess of luxury in their
most plenteous days had fallen short of the allowance of our
austerest fasts, - silent, patient, resigned, without sedition or dis-
turbance, almost without complaint, perished by an hundred a
day in the streets of Madras; every day seventy at least laid
their bodies in the streets, or on the glacis of Tanjore, and
expired of famine in the granary of India. I was going to


## p. 2797 (#369) ###########################################

EDMUND BURKE
2797
awake your justice towards this unhappy part of our fellow-
citizens by bringing before you some of the circumstances of this
plague of hunger. Of all the calamities which beset and waylay
the life of man, this comes the nearest to our heart, and is that
wherein the proudest of us all feels himself to be nothing more
than he is: but I find myself unable to manage it with decorum;
these details are of a species of horror so nauseous and dis-
gusting, they are so degrading to the sufferers and to the
hearers, they are so humiliating to human nature itself, that on
better thoughts I find it more advisable to throw a pall over this
hideous object, and to leave it to your general conceptions.
For eighteen months without intermission this destruction
raged from the gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore; and so
completely did these masters in their art, Hyder Ali and his
more ferocious son, absolve themselves of their impious vow,
that when the British armies traversed, as they did, the Carnatic
for hundreds of miles in all directions, through the whole line
of their march they did not see one man, not one woman,
not
one child, not one four-footed beast of any description whatever.
One dead uniform silence reigned over the whole region. With
the inconsiderable exceptions of the narrow vicinage of some few
forts, I wish to be understood as speaking literally; -I mean to
produce to you more than three witnesses, above all exception,
who will support this assertion in its full extent. That hurricane
of war passed through every part of the central provinces of the
Carnatic. Six or seven districts to the north and to the south
(and those not wholly untouched) escaped the general ravage.
The Carnatic is a country not much inferior in extent to Eng-
land. Figure to yourself, Mr. Speaker, the land in whose repre-
sentative chair you sit; figure to yourself the form and fashion
of your sweet and cheerful country from Thames to Trent north
and south, and from the Irish to the German Sea east and west,
emptied and emboweled (may God avert the omen of our crimes ! )
by so accomplished a desolation. Extend your imagination a
little farther, and then suppose your ministers taking a survey of
this scene of waste and desolation; what would be your thoughts
if you should be informed that they were computing how much
had been the amount of the excises, how much the customs,
how much the land and malt tax, in order that they should
charge (take it in the most favorable light) for public service,
upon the relics of the satiated vengeance of relentless enemies,


## p. 2798 (#370) ###########################################

2798
EDMUND BURKE
the whole of what England had yielded in the most exuberant
seasons of peace and abundance ? What would you call it ? To
call it tyranny sublimed into madness would be too faint an
image; yet this very madness is the principle upon which the
ministers at your right hand have proceeded in their estimate of
the revenues of the Carnatic, when they were providing, not sup-
ply for the establishments of its protection, but rewards for the
authors of its ruin.
Every day you are fatigued and disgusted with this cant: -
“ The Carnatic is a country that will soon recover, and become
instantly as prosperous as ever. ” They think they are talking to
innocents, who will believe that by sowing of dragons' teeth,
men may come up ready grown and ready armed. They who
will give themselves the trouble of considering (for it requires no
great reach of thought, no very profound knowledge) the manner
in which mankind are increased and countries cultivated, will
regard all this raving as it ought to be regarded. In order that
the people, after a long period of vexation and plunder, may be in
a condition to maintain government, government must begin by
maintaining them. Here the road to economy lies not through
receipt, but through expense; and in that country nature has
given no short cut to your object. Men must propagate, like
other animals, by the mouth. Never did oppression light the
nuptial torch; never did extortion and usury spread out the genial
bed. Does any of you think that England, so wasted, would,
under such a nursing attendance, so rapidly and cheaply recover ?
But he is meanly acquainted with either England or India, who
does not know that England would a thousand times sooner
resume population, fertility, and what ought to be the ultimate
secretion from both, revenue, – than such a country as the
Carnatic.
The Carnatic is not by the bounty of nature a fertile soil.
The general size of its cattle is proof enough that it is much
otherwise. It is some days since I moved that a curious and
interesting map kept in the India House should be laid before
you. The India House is not yet in readiness to send it; I have
therefore brought down my own copy, and there it lies for the
use of any gentleman who may think such a matter worthy of
his attention. It is indeed a noble map, and of noble things;
but it is decisive against the golden dreams and sanguine specu-
lations of avarice run mad. In addition to what you know must


## p. 2799 (#371) ###########################################

EDMUND BURKE
2799
be the case in every part of the world (the necessity of a pre-
vious provision, seed, stock, capital) that map will show you
that the uses of the influences of heaven itself are in that coun-
try a work of art. The Carnatic is refreshed by few or no liv-
ing brooks or running streams, and it has rain only at a season;
but its product of rice exacts the use of water subject to per-
petual command. This is the national bank of the Carnatic,
on which it must have a perpetual credit or it perishes irretriev-
ably. For that reason, in the happier times of India, a number,
almost incredible, of reservoirs have been made in chosen places
throughout the whole country; they are formed for the greater
part of mounds of earth and stones, with sluices of solid
masonry; the whole constructed with admirable skill and labor,
and maintained at a mighty charge. In the territory contained
in that map alone, I have been at the trouble of reckoning the
reservoirs, and they amount to upwards of eleven hundred, from
the extent of two or three acres to five miles in circuit. From
these reservoirs currents are occasionally drawn over the fields,
and these water-courses again call for a considerable expense to
keep them properly scoured and duly leveled. Taking the dis-
trict in that map as a measure, there cannot be in the Carnatic
and Tanjore fewer than ten thousand of these reservoirs of the
larger and middling dimensions, to say nothing of those for
domestic services and the uses of religious purification. These
are not the enterprises of your power, nor in a style of mag-
nificence suited to the taste of
your
minister. These are the
monuments of real kings, who were the fathers of their people;
testators to a posterity which they embrace as their own. These
are the grand sepulchres built by ambition; but the ambition of
an insatiable benevolence, which, not contented with reigning
in the dispensation of happiness during the contracted term of
human life, had strained, with all the reachings and graspings of
a vivacious mind, to extend the dominion of their bounty beyond
the limits of nature, and to perpetuate themselves through gen-
erations of generations, the guardians, the protectors, the nour-
ishers of mankind.
Long before the late invasion, the persons who are objects of
the grant of public money now before you had so diverted the
supply of the pious funds of culture and population that every-
where the reservoirs were fallen into a miserable decay. But
after those domestic enemies had provoked the entry of a cruel


## p. 2800 (#372) ###########################################

2800
EDMUND BURKE
foreign foe into the country, he did not leave it until his revenge
had completed the destruction begun by their avarice. Few,
very few indeed, of these magazines of water that are not either
totally destroyed, or cut through with such gaps as to require
a serious attention and much cost to re-establish them, as the
means of present subsistence to the people and of future revenue
to the State.
What, sir, would a virtuous and enlightened ministry do on
the view of the ruins of such works before them ? on the view
of such a chasm of desolation as that which yawned in the midst
of those countries to the north and south, which still bore some
vestiges of cultivation? They would have reduced all their most
necessary establishments; they would have suspended the justest
payments; they would have employed every shilling derived from
the producing, to re-animate the powers of the unproductive,
parts. While they were performing this fundamental duty, whilst
they were celebrating these mysteries of justice and humanity,
they would have told the corps of fictitious creditors whose
crimes were their claims, that they must keep an awful distance;
that they must silence their inauspicious tongues; that they must
hold off their profane, unhallowed paws from this holy work;
they would have proclaimed with a voice that should make itself
heard, that on every country the first creditor is the plow,- that
this original, indefeasible claim supersedes every other demand.
This is what a wise and virtuous ministry would have done
and said. This, therefore, is what our minister could never
think of saying or doing. A ministry of another kind would
first have improved the country, and have thus laid a solid
foundation for future opulence and future force. But on this
grand point of the restoration of the country, there is not one
syllable to be found in the correspondence of our ministers, from
the first to the last; they felt nothing for a land desolated by
fire, sword, and famine; their sympathies took another direction:
they were touched with pity for bribery, so long tormented with
a fruitless itching of its palms; their bowels yearned for usury,
that had long missed the harvest of its returning months; they
felt for peculation, which had been for so many years raking in
the dust of an empty treasury; they were melted into compassion
for rapine and oppression, licking their dry, parched, unbloody
jaws. These were the objects of their solicitude. These were
the necessities for which they were studious to provide.


## p. 2801 (#373) ###########################################

EDMUND BURKE
2801
To state the country and its revenues in their real condition,
and to provide for those fictitious claims consistently with the
support of an army and a civil establishment, would have been
impossible; therefore the ministers are silent on that head, and
rest themselves on the authority of Lord Macartney, who in a
letter to the court of directors written in the year 1781, specu-
lating on what might be the result of a wise management of the
countries assigned by the Nabob of Arcot, rates the revenues,
as in time of peace, at twelve hundred thousand pounds a year,
as he does those of the King of Tanjore (which had not been
assigned) at four hundred and fifty. On this Lord Macartney
grounds his calculations, and on this they choose to ground theirs.
It was on this calculation that the ministry, in direct opposition
to the remonstrances of the court of directors, have compelled
that miserable enslaved body to put their hands to an order for
appropriating the enormous sum of £480,000 annually, as a fund
for paying to their rebellious servants a debt contracted in defi-
ance of their clearest and most positive injunctions.
The authority and information of Lord Macartney is held
high on this occasion, though it is totally rejected in every other
particular of this business. I believe I have the honor of being
almost as old an acquaintance as any Lord Macartney has. A
constant and unbroken friendship has subsisted between us from
a very early period; and I trust he thinks that as I respect his
character, and in general admire his conduct, I am one of those
who feel no common interest in his reputation. Yet I do not
hesitate wholly to disallow the calculation of 1781, without any
apprehension that I shall appear to distrust his veracity or his
judgment. This
peace
estimate of revenue was not grounded
on the state of the Carnatic as it then, or as it had recently,
stood. It was a statement of former and better times. There
is no doubt that a period did exist when the large portion of
the Carnatic held by the Nabob of Arcot might be fairly reputed
to produce a revenue to that, or to a greater amount. But the
whole had so melted away by the slow and silent hostilities of
oppression and mismanagement, that the revenues, sinking with
the prosperity of the country, had fallen to about £800,000 a
year even before an enemy's horse had imprinted his hoof on
the soil of the Carnatic. From that view, and independently of
the decisive effects of the war which ensued, Sir Eyre Coote con-
ceived that years must pass before the country could be restored
VII-176


## p. 2802 (#374) ###########################################

2802
EDMUND BURKE
to its former prosperity and production. It was that state of
revenue (namely, the actual state before the war) which the
directors have opposed to Lord Macartney's speculation. They
refused to take the revenues for more than £800,000. In this
they are justified by Lord Macartney himself, who in a subse-
quent letter informs the court that his sketch is a matter of
speculation; it supposes the country restored to its ancient pros-
perity, and the revenue to be in a course of effective and honest
collection. If therefore the ministers have gone wrong, they
were not deceived by Lord Macartney: they were deceived by
no man. The estimate of the directors is nearly the very esti-
mate furnished by the right honorable gentleman himself, and
published to the world in one of the printed reports of his own
committee; but as soon as he obtained his power, he chose to
abandon his account. No part of his official conduct can be
defended on the ground of his Parliamentary information.
FROM THE SPEECH ON (THE FRENCH REVOLUTION)
WE
HEN ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the
loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment
we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know dis-
tinctly to what port we steer. Europe, undoubtedly, taken in a
mass, was in a flourishing condition the day on which your
revolution was completed. How much of that prosperous state
was owing to the spirit of our old manners and opinions is not
easy to say; but as such causes cannot be indifferent in their
operation, we must presume that on the whole their operation
was beneficial.
We are but too apt to consider things in the state in which
we find them, without sufficiently adverting to the causes by
which they have been produced and possibly may be upheld.