Indeed, the theatre is a better school of moral sentiments
than churches where the feelings of humanity are thus out-
raged.
than churches where the feelings of humanity are thus out-
raged.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v05 - Bro to Cai
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.
## p. 2792 (#364) ###########################################
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
## p. 2793 (#365) ###########################################
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.
Nothing is more certain than that our manners, our civilization,
and all the good things which are connected with manners and
with civilization, have in this European world of ours depended
for ages upon two principles, and were indeed the result of both
combined: I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of
religion. The nobility and the clergy, the one by profession,
the other by patronage, kept learning in existence even in the
midst of and confusions, and whilst governments were
arms
## p. 2803 (#375) ###########################################
EDMUND BURKE
2803
rather in their causes than formed. Learning paid back what it
received to nobility and to priesthood; and paid it with usury,
by enlarging their ideas and by furnishing their minds. Happy
if they had all continued to know their indissoluble union and
their proper place! Happy if learning, not debauched by ambi-
tion, had been satisfied to continue the instructor, and not
aspired to be the master! Along with its natural protectors and
guardians, learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down
under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.
If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are
always willing to own to ancient manners, so do other interests
which we value full as much as they are worth. Even com-
merce and trade and manufacture, the gods of our economical
politicians, are themselves perhaps but creatures; are themselves
but effects, which as first causes we choose to worship. They
certainly grew under the same shade in which learning four-
ished. They too may decay with their natural protecting prin-
ciples. With you, for the present at least, they threaten to
disappear together. Where trade and manufactures are wanting
to a people, and the spirit of nobility and religion remains,
sentiment supplies, and not always ill supplies, their place; but
if commerce and the arts should be lost in an experiment to try
how well a State may stand without these old fundamental prin-
ciples, what sort of a thing must be a nation of gross, stupid,
ferocious, and at the same time poor and sordid barbarians, -
destitute of religion, honor, or manly pride, possessing nothing
at present and hoping for nothing hereafter ?
I wish you may not be going fast, and by the shortest cut, to
that horrible and disgustful situation. Already there appears a
poverty of conception, a coarseness and vulgarity, in all the pro-
ceedings of the Assembly and of all their instructors. Their
liberty is not liberal. Their science is presumptuous ignorance.
Their humanity is savage and brutal.
It is not clear whether in England we learned those grand
and decorous principles and manners, of which considerable
'traces yet remain, from you, or whether you took them from us.
But to you, I think, we trace them best. You seem to me to
be gentis incunabula nostra. France has always more or less in-
fluenced manners in England; and when your fountain is choked
up and polluted the stream will not run long, or not run clear,
with us or perhaps with any nation. This gives all Europe, in
## p. 2804 (#376) ###########################################
2804
EDMUND BURKE
my opinion, but too close and connected a concern in what is
done in France. Excuse me therefore if I have dwelt too long
on the atrocious spectacle of the 6th of October, 1789, or have
given too much scope to the reflections which have arisen in my
mind on occasion of the most important of all revolutions, which
may be dated from that day, -I mean a revolution in senti-
ments, manners, and moral opinions. As things now stand, with
everything respectable destroyed without us, and an attempt to
destroy within us every principle of respect, one is almost forced
to apologize for harboring the common feelings of men.
Why do I feel so differently from the Reverend Dr. Price
and those of his lay flock who will choose to adopt the senti-
ments of his discourse ? For this plain reason - because it is
natural I should; because we are so made as to be affected at
such spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon the unstable
condition of mortal prosperity, and the tremendous uncertainty
of human greatness; because in those natural feelings we learn
great lessons; because in events like these our passions instruct
our reason; because when kings are hurled from their thrones
by the Supreme Director of this great drama, and become the
objects of insult to the base and of pity to the good, we behold
such disasters in the moral as we should a miracle in the physi-
cal order of things. We are alarmed into reflection; our minds
(as it has long since been observed) are purified by terror and
pity; our weak, unthinking pride is humbled under the dis-
pensations of a mysterious wisdom. Some tears might be drawn
from
me, if such a spectacle were exhibited on the stage. I
should be truly ashamed of finding in myself that superficial,
theatric sense of painted distress, whilst I could exult over it in
real life. With such a perverted mind, I could never venture to
show my face at a tragedy. People would think the tears that
Garrick formerly, or that Siddons not long since, have extorted
from me, were the tears of hypocrisy; I should know them to
be the tears of folly.
Indeed, the theatre is a better school of moral sentiments
than churches where the feelings of humanity are thus out-
raged. Poets, who have to deal with an audience not yet grad-
uated in the school of the rights of men, and who must apply
themselves to the moral constitution of the heart, would not dare
to produce such a triumph as a matter of exultation. There,
where men follow their natural impulses, they would not bear
## p. 2805 (#377) ###########################################
EDMUND BURKE
2805
the odious maxims of a Machiavellian policy, whether applied
to the attainment of monarchical or democratic tyranny. They
would reject them on the modern, as they once did on the
ancient stage, where they could not bear even the hypothetical
proposition of such wickedness in the mouth of a personated
tyrant, though suitable to the character he sustained. No the-
atric audience in Athens would bear what has been borne in the
midst of the real tragedy of this triumphal day: a principal actor
weighing, as it were in scales hung in a shop of horrors, so
much actual crime against so much contingent advantage, and
after putting in and out weights, declaring that the balance was
on the side of the advantages. They would not bear to see the
crimes of new democracy posted as in a ledger against the
crimes of old despotism, and the book-keepers of politics finding
democracy still in debt, but by no means unable or unwilling
to pay the balance. In the theatre, the first intuitive glance,
without any elaborate process of reasoning, will show that this
method of political computation would justify every extent of
crime. They would see that on these principles, even where the
very worst acts were not perpetrated, it was owing rather to the
fortune of the conspirators than to their parsimony in the expend-
iture of treachery and blood. They would soon see that crim-
inal means, once tolerated, are soon preferred. They present a
shorter cut to the object than through the highway of the moral
virtues. Justifying perfidy and murder for public benefit, public
benefit would soon become the pretext, and perfidy and murder
the end; until rapacity, malice, revenge, and fear more dreadful
than revenge, could satiate their insatiable appetites. Such must
be the consequences of losing, in the splendor of these triumphs
of the rights of men, all natural sense of wrong and right.
But the reverend pastor exults in this “leading in triumph,"
because truly Louis the Sixteenth was “an arbitrary monarch ";
that is, in other words, neither more nor less than because he
was Louis the Sixteenth, and because he had the misfortune to
be born King of France, with the prerogatives of which a long
line of ancestors, and a long acquiescence of the people, without
any act of his, had put him in possession. A misfortune it has
indeed turned out to him, that he was born King of France.
But misfortune is not crime, nor is indiscretion always the
greatest guilt. I shall never think that a prince, the acts of
whose whole reign were a series of concessions to his subjects;
## p. 2806 (#378) ###########################################
2806
EDMUND BURKE
who was willing to relax his authority, to remit his prerogatives,
to call his people to a share of freedom not known, perhaps not
desired, by their ancestors: such a prince, though he should be
subjected to the common frailties attached to men and to princes,
though he should have once thought it necessary to provide
force against the desperate designs manifestly carrying on against
his person and the remnants of his authority, - though all this
should be taken into consideration, I shall be led with great
difficulty to think he deserves the cruel and insulting triumph of
Paris and of Dr. Price. I tremble for the cause of liberty, from
such an example to kings. I tremble for the cause of humanity,
in the unpunished outrages of the most wicked of mankind.
But there are some people of that low and degenerate fashion of
mind that they look up with a sort of complacent awe and
admiration to kings who know how to keep firm in their seat, to
hold a strict hand over their subjects, to assert their prerogative,
and by the awakened vigilance of a severe despotism to guard
against the very first approaches of freedom. Against such as
these they never elevate their voice. Deserters from principle,
listed with fortune, they never see any good in suffering virtue,
nor any crime in prosperous usurpation.
If it could have been made clear to me that the King and
Queen of France (those I mean who were such before the
triumph) were inexorable and cruel tyrants, that they had
formed a deliberate scheme for massacring the National Assem-
bly (I think I have seen something like the latter insinuated in
certain publications), I should think their captivity just. If this
be true, much more ought to have been done; but done, in my
opinion, in another manner. The punishment of real tyrants is
a noble and awful act of justice; and it has with truth been said
to be consolatory to the human mind. But if I were to punish
a wicked king, I should regard the dignity in avenging the
crime. Justice is grave and decorous, and in its punishments
rather seems to submit to a necessity than to make a choice.
Had Nero, or Agrippina, or Louis the Eleventh, or Charles the
Ninth, been the subject; if Charles the Twelfth of Sweden after
the murder of Patkul, or his predecessor Christina after the
murder of Monaldeschi, had fallen into your hands, sir, or into
mine, I am sure our conduct would have been different.
If the French King, or King of the French (or by whatever
name he is known in the new vocabulary of your constitution),
## p. 2807 (#379) ###########################################
EDMUND BURKE
2807
has in his own person and that of his Queen really deserved these
unavowed but unavenged murderous attempts, and those frequent
indignities more cruel than murder, such a person would ill de-
serve even that subordinate executory trust which I understand
is to be placed in him; nor is he fit to be called chief in a nation
which he has outraged and oppressed. A worse choice for such
an office in a new commonwealth than that of a deposed tyrant
could not possibly be made. But to degrade and insult a man
as the worst of criminals, and afterwards to trust him in your
highest concerns as a faithful, honest, and zealous servant, is not
consistent with reasoning, nor prudent in policy, nor safe in
practice. Those who could make such an appointment must be
guilty of a more flagrant breach of trust than any they have yet
committed against the people. As this is the only crime in
which your leading politicians could have acted inconsistently, I
conclude that there is no sort of ground for these horrid insin-
uations. I think no better of all the other calumnies.
In England, we give no credit to them. We are generous
enemies: we are faithful allies. We spurn from us with disgust
and indignation the slanders of those who bring us their anec-
dotes with the attestation of the flower-de-luce on their shoulder.
We have Lord George Gordon fast in Newgate; and neither his
being a public proselyte to Judaism, nor his having, in his zeal
against Catholic priests and all sorts of ecclesiastics, raised a mob
(excuse the term, it is still in use here) which pulled down all
our prisons, have preserved to him a liberty of which he did not
render himself worthy by a virtuous use of it. We have rebuilt
Newgate, and tenanted the mansion. We have prisons almost as
strong as the Bastile for those who dare to libel the Queens of
France. In this spiritual retreat let the noble libeler remain.
Let him there meditate on his Talmud, until he learns a conduct
more becoming his birth and parts, and not so disgraceful to the
ancient religion to which he has become a proselyte; or until
some persons from your side of the water, to please your new
Hebrew brethren, shall ransom him. He may then be enabled
to purchase, with the old hoards of the synagogue, and a very
small poundage on the long compound interest of the thirty pieces
of silver (Dr. Price has shown us what miracles compound interest
will perform in 1790 years), the lands which are lately discovered
to have been usurped by the Gallican Church. Send us your
Popish Archbishop of Paris, and we will send you our Protestant
## p. 2808 (#380) ###########################################
2808
EDMUND BURKE
Rabbin. We shall treat the person you send us in exchange like
a gentleman and an honest man, as he is; but pray let him
bring with him the fund of his hospitality, bounty, and charity;
and depend upon it, we shall never confiscate a shilling of that
honorable and pious fund, nor think of enriching the treasury
with the spoils of the poor-box.
To tell you the truth, my dear sir, I think the honor of our
nation to be somewhat concerned in the disclaimer of the pro-
ceedings of this society of the Old Jewry and the London Tavern.
I have no man's proxy. I speak only for myself when I dis.
claim, as I do with all possible earnestness, all communion with
the actors in that triumph, or with the admirers of it.
assert anything else, as concerning the people of England, I
speak from observation, not from authority; but I speak from the
experience I have had in a pretty extensive and mixed commu-
nication with the inhabitants of this kingdom, of all descriptions
and ranks, and after a course of attentive observation begun
early in life, and continued for nearly forty years. I have often
been astonished, considering that we are divided from you but by
a slender dike of about twenty-four miles, and that the mutual
intercourse between the two countries has lately been very great,
to find how little you seem to know of us. I suspect that this is
owing to your forming a judgment of this nation from certain
publications which do very erroneously, if they do at all, repre-
sent the opinions and dispositions generally prevalent in Eng.
land. The vanity, restlessness, petulance, and spirit of intrigue of
several petty cabals, who attempt to hide their total want of con-
sequence in bustle, and noise, and puffing, and mutual quotation
of each other, makes you imagine that our contemptuous neglect
of their abilities is a mark of general acquiescence in their
opinions. No such thing, I assure you. Because half a dozen
grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their impor-
tunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle reposed beneath the
shadow of the British oak chew the cud and are silent, pray do
not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhab-
itants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or
that after all they are other than the little, shriveled, meagre,
hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.
## p. 2809 (#381) ###########################################
2809
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
(1849-)
M
erness.
Rs. BURNETT has told the story of her childhood and tried to
interpret her own personality in her autobiographical story,
“The One I Knew Best of All. ' She has pictured a little
English girl in a comfortable Manchester home, leading a humdrum,
well-regulated existence, with brothers and sisters, nurse and gov-
But an alert imagination added interest to the life of this
« Small Person, and from her nursery windows and from the quiet
park where she played she watched eagerly for anything of dramatic
or picturesque interest. She seized upon the Lancashire dialect often
overheard, as upon a game, and practiced it until she gained the
facility of use shown in her mining and factory stories. One day the
strong and beautiful figure of a young woman, followed by a coarse
and abusive father, caught her attention, and years afterward she
developed Joan Lowrie from the incident.
When the Hodgson family suffered pecuniary loss, and hoping to
better its fortunes came to America, then best known to Frances
from the pages of Uncle Tom's Cabin, she was fifteen. A year or
two later she began to send her stories to various magazines. In
1867 the first of these appeared. She did not however attain her
great popularity until the appearance of That Lass o' Lowrie's)
in 1877. The thoughtfully drawn group of characters — Derrick
the engineer, Grace the young minister, Annie the rector's daughter,
and Joan the pit girl, - are dramatic figures, working out their life
problems under the eyes and the comments of half-cynical, half-
brutalized miners. There is nothing in her history to account for
Joan, or for the fact that the strength of vice in her father becomes
an equal strength of virtue in her. Abused since her babyhood, doing
the work of a man among degrading companionships, she yet remains
capable of the noblest self-abnegation. Mrs. Burnett delights in
heroes and heroines who are thus loftily at variance with their sur-
roundings. Her stories are romantic in spirit, offering little to the
lover of psychologic analysis. Her character-drawing is the product
of quick observation and sympathetic intuition. She does not
write «tendency novels, but appeals to simple emotions of love,
hate, revenge, or self-immolation, which sometimes, as in the case
of her last book, "A Lady of Quality' (1895), verge on sensational-
ism. In 1873 Miss Hodgson married Dr. Burnett of Washington. Her
## p. 2810 (#382) ###########################################
2810
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
longest novel, “Through One Administration,' is a story of the politi-
cal and social life of the Capital. Little Lord Fauntleroy' (1886) is
the best known of a series of stories nominally written for children,
but intended to be read by their elders. (Sara Crewe,' (Giovanni
and the Other,' 'Two Little Pilgrims, and Little Saint Elizabeth'
are chronicles of superlunary children. After those before mentioned,
(Esmeralda,' 'Louisiana,' (A Fair Barbarian,' and Haworth's) are
her best known stories.
AT THE PIT
From (That Lass o' Lowrie's )
TH
He next morning Derrick went down to the mine as usual.
There were several things he wished to do in these last
two days. He had heard that the managers had entered
into negotiations with a new engineer, and he wished the man
to find no half-done work. The day was bright and frosty, and
the sharp, bracing air seemed to clear his brain. He felt more
hopeful, and less inclined to view matters darkly.
He remembered afterward that as he stepped into the cage he
turned to look at the unpicturesque little town, brightened by the
winter's sun; and that as he went down he glanced up at the
sky, and marked how intense appeared the bit of blue which was
framed in by the mouth of the shaft.
Even in the few hours that had elapsed since the meeting,
the rumor of what he had said and done had been bruited about.
Some collier had heard it and had told it to his comrades, and so
it had gone from one to the other. It had been talked over at
the evening and morning meal in divers cottages, and many an
anxious hand had warmed into praise of the man who had had
a thowt for th' men. ”
In the first gallery he entered he found a deputation of men
awaiting him, --- a group of burly miners with picks and shovels
over their shoulders,- and the head of this deputation, a spokes-
man burlier and generally gruffer than the rest, stopped him.
“Mester,” he said, “we chaps 'ud loike to ha' a word wi' yo'. ”
« All right,” was Derrick's reply, “I am ready to listen. ”
The rest crowded nearer, as if anxious to participate as much
as possible, and give their spokesman the support of their pres-
ence.
## p. 2811 (#383) ###########################################
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
2811
“It is na mich as we ha' getten to say,” said the man, <but
we're fain to say it. Are na we, mates ? ”
“Ay, we are, lad,” in chorus.
“It's about summat as we'n heerd. Theer wur a chap as towd
some on us last neet as yo'd getten th’ sack fro' th’ managers —
or leastways as yo'd turned th' tables on 'em an' gi’en them th'
sack yo'rsen. An' we'n heerd as it begun wi' yo're standin' up
fur us chaps — axin' fur things as wur wanted i’ th’ pit to save
us fro' runnin' more risk than we need. An' we heerd as yo'
spoke up bold, an' argied for us an' stood to what yo’ thowt war
th' reet thing, an’ we set our moinds on tellin' yo' as we'd heerd
it an' talked it over, an' we'd loike to say a word o' thanks i’
common fur th' pluck yo' showed. Is na that it, mates ? »
“Ay, that it is, lad! ” responded the chorus.
Suddenly one of the group stepped out and threw down his
pick. “An' I'm dom’d, mates,” he said, “if here is na a chap as
ud loike to shake hands wi' him. ”
It was the signal for the rest to follow his example. They
crowded about their champion, thrusting grimy paws into his
hand, grasping it almost enthusiastically.
“Good luck to yo', lad! ” said one. “We'n noan smooth soart
o'chaps, but we'n stand by what's fair an' plucky. We shall
ha' a good word fur thee when tha hast made thy Aittin'. ”
"I'm glad of that, lads,” responded Derrick heartily, by no
means unmoved by the rough-and-ready spirit of the scene. I
only wish I had had better luck, that's all. "
A few hours later the whole of the little town was shaken to
its very foundations by something like an earthquake, accom-
panied by an ominous, booming sound which brought people
flocking out of their houses with white faces. Some of them
had heard it before — all knew what it meant. From the
colliers' cottages poured forth women, shrieking and wailing,-
women who bore children in their arms and had older ones
dragging at their skirts, and who made their desperate way to
the pit with one accord. From houses and workshops there
rushed men, who coming out in twos and threes joined each
other, and forming a breathless crowd, ran through the streets
scarcely daring to speak a word — and all ran toward the pit.
There were
at its mouth in five minutes; in ten
minutes there were hundreds, and above all the clamor rose the
cry of women:
(
scores
## p. 2812 (#384) ###########################################
2812
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
"My mester's down ! »
“An' mine! ”
"An' mine!
"Four lads o' mine is down! »
« Three o' mine! ”
“My little un's theer — th' youngest — nobbut ten year owd –
nobbut ten year owd, poor little chap! an'ony been at work a
week!
«Ay, wenches, God ha' mercy on us aw'— God ha’ mercy! ”
And then more shrieks and wails, in which the terror-stricken
children joined.
It was a fearful sight. How many lay dead and dying in
the noisome darkness below, God only knew! How many lay
mangled and crushed, waiting for their death, Heaven only could
tell!
In five minutes after the explosion occurred, a slight figure
in clerical garb made its way through the crowd with an air of
excited determination.
“Th' parson's feart," was the general comment.
"My men,” he said, raising his voice so that all could hear,
can any of you tell me who last saw Fergus Derrick ? »
There was a brief pause, and then came a reply from a col-
lier who stood near.
“I coom up out o'th' pit an hour ago,” he said, “I wur th'
last as coom up, an' it wur on'y chance as browt me. Derrick
wur wi' his men i'th' new part o' th’mine. I seed him as I
passed through. "
Grace's face became a shade or so paler, but he made no
more inquiries.
His friend either lay dead below, or was waiting for his doom
at that very moment. He stepped a little farther forward.
“Unfortunately for myself, at present,” he said, “I have no
practical knowledge of the nature of these accidents.
Will some
of you tell me how long it will be before we can make our first
effort to rescue the men who are below ? »
Did he mean to volunteer - this young whipper-snapper of a
parson? And if he did, could he know what he was doing ?
“I ask you,” he said, “because I wish to offer myself as a
volunteer at once; I think I am stronger than you imagine, and
at least my heart will be in the work. I have a friend below
myself,” his voice altering its tone and losing its firmness, -
(
## p. 2813 (#385) ###########################################
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
2813
«a friend who is worthy the sacrifice of ten such lives as mine, if
such a sacrifice could save him. ”
One or two of the older and more experienced spoke up.
Under an hour it would be impossible to make the attempt — it
might even be a longer time, but in an hour they might at least
make their first effort.
If such was the case, the parson said, the intervening period
must be turned to the best account. In that time much could
be thought of and done which would assist themselves and ben-
efit the sufferers. He called upon the strongest and most expe-
rienced, and almost without their recognizing the prominence
of his position, led them on in the work. He even rallied the
weeping women and gave them something to do. One was sent
for this necessary article and another for that. A couple of boys
were dispatched to the next village for extra medical assistance,
so that there need be no lack of attention when it was required.
He took off his broadcloth and worked with the rest of them
until all the necessary preparations were made, and it was con-
sidered possible to descend into the mine,
When all was ready, he went to the mouth of the shaft and
took his place quietly.
It was a hazardous task they had before them. Death would
stare them in the face all through its performance. There was
choking after-damp below,- noxious vapors, to breathe which
was to die; there was the chance of crushing masses falling
from the shaken galleries - and yet these men left their compan-
ions one by one, and ranged themselves without saying a word
at the curate's side.
“My friends," said Grace, baring his head and raising a fem-
inine hand, -"My friends, we will say a short prayer. "
It was only a few words. Then the curate spoke again.
Ready! ” he said.
But just at that moment there stepped out from the anguished
crowd a girl, whose face was set and deathly, though there was
no touch of fear upon it.
“I ax yo',” she said, “to let me go wi' yo' and do what I
con. Lasses, some on yo' speak a word for Joan Lowrie! »
There was a breathless start. The women even stopped their
outcry to look at her as she stood apart from them,-a desperate
appeal in the very quiet of her gesture as she turned to look
about her for some one to speak.
## p. 2814 (#386) ###########################################
2814
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
“Lasses,” she said again, “some on yo' speak a word for Joan
Lowrie !
There rose a murmur among them then, and the next instant
this murmur was a cry.
“Ay,” they answered, “we con aw speak fur yo'. Let her
go, lads! She's worth two o' th’ best on yo'. Nowt fears her.
Ay, she mun go, if she will, mun Joan Lowrie! Go, Joan lass,
and we'n not forget thee! ”
But the men demurred. The finer instinct of some of them
shrank from giving a woman a place in such a perilous under-
taking - the coarser element in others rebelled against it.
« We'n ha' no wenches,” these said, surlily.
Grace stepped forward. He went to Joan Lowrie and touched
her gently on the shoulder.
“We cannot think of it,” he said. “It is very brave and
generous, and
God bless you! but it cannot be. I could not
think of allowing it myself, if the rest would. ”
"Parson,” said Joan, coolly but not roughly, "thad ha' hard
work to help thysen, if so be as th' lads wur willin'! »
" But,” he protested, “it may be death. I could not bear the
thought of it. You are a woman. We cannot let you risk your
life. ”
mon
She turned to the volunteers.
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.
## p. 2792 (#364) ###########################################
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
## p. 2793 (#365) ###########################################
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
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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.
Nothing is more certain than that our manners, our civilization,
and all the good things which are connected with manners and
with civilization, have in this European world of ours depended
for ages upon two principles, and were indeed the result of both
combined: I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of
religion. The nobility and the clergy, the one by profession,
the other by patronage, kept learning in existence even in the
midst of and confusions, and whilst governments were
arms
## p. 2803 (#375) ###########################################
EDMUND BURKE
2803
rather in their causes than formed. Learning paid back what it
received to nobility and to priesthood; and paid it with usury,
by enlarging their ideas and by furnishing their minds. Happy
if they had all continued to know their indissoluble union and
their proper place! Happy if learning, not debauched by ambi-
tion, had been satisfied to continue the instructor, and not
aspired to be the master! Along with its natural protectors and
guardians, learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down
under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.
If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are
always willing to own to ancient manners, so do other interests
which we value full as much as they are worth. Even com-
merce and trade and manufacture, the gods of our economical
politicians, are themselves perhaps but creatures; are themselves
but effects, which as first causes we choose to worship. They
certainly grew under the same shade in which learning four-
ished. They too may decay with their natural protecting prin-
ciples. With you, for the present at least, they threaten to
disappear together. Where trade and manufactures are wanting
to a people, and the spirit of nobility and religion remains,
sentiment supplies, and not always ill supplies, their place; but
if commerce and the arts should be lost in an experiment to try
how well a State may stand without these old fundamental prin-
ciples, what sort of a thing must be a nation of gross, stupid,
ferocious, and at the same time poor and sordid barbarians, -
destitute of religion, honor, or manly pride, possessing nothing
at present and hoping for nothing hereafter ?
I wish you may not be going fast, and by the shortest cut, to
that horrible and disgustful situation. Already there appears a
poverty of conception, a coarseness and vulgarity, in all the pro-
ceedings of the Assembly and of all their instructors. Their
liberty is not liberal. Their science is presumptuous ignorance.
Their humanity is savage and brutal.
It is not clear whether in England we learned those grand
and decorous principles and manners, of which considerable
'traces yet remain, from you, or whether you took them from us.
But to you, I think, we trace them best. You seem to me to
be gentis incunabula nostra. France has always more or less in-
fluenced manners in England; and when your fountain is choked
up and polluted the stream will not run long, or not run clear,
with us or perhaps with any nation. This gives all Europe, in
## p. 2804 (#376) ###########################################
2804
EDMUND BURKE
my opinion, but too close and connected a concern in what is
done in France. Excuse me therefore if I have dwelt too long
on the atrocious spectacle of the 6th of October, 1789, or have
given too much scope to the reflections which have arisen in my
mind on occasion of the most important of all revolutions, which
may be dated from that day, -I mean a revolution in senti-
ments, manners, and moral opinions. As things now stand, with
everything respectable destroyed without us, and an attempt to
destroy within us every principle of respect, one is almost forced
to apologize for harboring the common feelings of men.
Why do I feel so differently from the Reverend Dr. Price
and those of his lay flock who will choose to adopt the senti-
ments of his discourse ? For this plain reason - because it is
natural I should; because we are so made as to be affected at
such spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon the unstable
condition of mortal prosperity, and the tremendous uncertainty
of human greatness; because in those natural feelings we learn
great lessons; because in events like these our passions instruct
our reason; because when kings are hurled from their thrones
by the Supreme Director of this great drama, and become the
objects of insult to the base and of pity to the good, we behold
such disasters in the moral as we should a miracle in the physi-
cal order of things. We are alarmed into reflection; our minds
(as it has long since been observed) are purified by terror and
pity; our weak, unthinking pride is humbled under the dis-
pensations of a mysterious wisdom. Some tears might be drawn
from
me, if such a spectacle were exhibited on the stage. I
should be truly ashamed of finding in myself that superficial,
theatric sense of painted distress, whilst I could exult over it in
real life. With such a perverted mind, I could never venture to
show my face at a tragedy. People would think the tears that
Garrick formerly, or that Siddons not long since, have extorted
from me, were the tears of hypocrisy; I should know them to
be the tears of folly.
Indeed, the theatre is a better school of moral sentiments
than churches where the feelings of humanity are thus out-
raged. Poets, who have to deal with an audience not yet grad-
uated in the school of the rights of men, and who must apply
themselves to the moral constitution of the heart, would not dare
to produce such a triumph as a matter of exultation. There,
where men follow their natural impulses, they would not bear
## p. 2805 (#377) ###########################################
EDMUND BURKE
2805
the odious maxims of a Machiavellian policy, whether applied
to the attainment of monarchical or democratic tyranny. They
would reject them on the modern, as they once did on the
ancient stage, where they could not bear even the hypothetical
proposition of such wickedness in the mouth of a personated
tyrant, though suitable to the character he sustained. No the-
atric audience in Athens would bear what has been borne in the
midst of the real tragedy of this triumphal day: a principal actor
weighing, as it were in scales hung in a shop of horrors, so
much actual crime against so much contingent advantage, and
after putting in and out weights, declaring that the balance was
on the side of the advantages. They would not bear to see the
crimes of new democracy posted as in a ledger against the
crimes of old despotism, and the book-keepers of politics finding
democracy still in debt, but by no means unable or unwilling
to pay the balance. In the theatre, the first intuitive glance,
without any elaborate process of reasoning, will show that this
method of political computation would justify every extent of
crime. They would see that on these principles, even where the
very worst acts were not perpetrated, it was owing rather to the
fortune of the conspirators than to their parsimony in the expend-
iture of treachery and blood. They would soon see that crim-
inal means, once tolerated, are soon preferred. They present a
shorter cut to the object than through the highway of the moral
virtues. Justifying perfidy and murder for public benefit, public
benefit would soon become the pretext, and perfidy and murder
the end; until rapacity, malice, revenge, and fear more dreadful
than revenge, could satiate their insatiable appetites. Such must
be the consequences of losing, in the splendor of these triumphs
of the rights of men, all natural sense of wrong and right.
But the reverend pastor exults in this “leading in triumph,"
because truly Louis the Sixteenth was “an arbitrary monarch ";
that is, in other words, neither more nor less than because he
was Louis the Sixteenth, and because he had the misfortune to
be born King of France, with the prerogatives of which a long
line of ancestors, and a long acquiescence of the people, without
any act of his, had put him in possession. A misfortune it has
indeed turned out to him, that he was born King of France.
But misfortune is not crime, nor is indiscretion always the
greatest guilt. I shall never think that a prince, the acts of
whose whole reign were a series of concessions to his subjects;
## p. 2806 (#378) ###########################################
2806
EDMUND BURKE
who was willing to relax his authority, to remit his prerogatives,
to call his people to a share of freedom not known, perhaps not
desired, by their ancestors: such a prince, though he should be
subjected to the common frailties attached to men and to princes,
though he should have once thought it necessary to provide
force against the desperate designs manifestly carrying on against
his person and the remnants of his authority, - though all this
should be taken into consideration, I shall be led with great
difficulty to think he deserves the cruel and insulting triumph of
Paris and of Dr. Price. I tremble for the cause of liberty, from
such an example to kings. I tremble for the cause of humanity,
in the unpunished outrages of the most wicked of mankind.
But there are some people of that low and degenerate fashion of
mind that they look up with a sort of complacent awe and
admiration to kings who know how to keep firm in their seat, to
hold a strict hand over their subjects, to assert their prerogative,
and by the awakened vigilance of a severe despotism to guard
against the very first approaches of freedom. Against such as
these they never elevate their voice. Deserters from principle,
listed with fortune, they never see any good in suffering virtue,
nor any crime in prosperous usurpation.
If it could have been made clear to me that the King and
Queen of France (those I mean who were such before the
triumph) were inexorable and cruel tyrants, that they had
formed a deliberate scheme for massacring the National Assem-
bly (I think I have seen something like the latter insinuated in
certain publications), I should think their captivity just. If this
be true, much more ought to have been done; but done, in my
opinion, in another manner. The punishment of real tyrants is
a noble and awful act of justice; and it has with truth been said
to be consolatory to the human mind. But if I were to punish
a wicked king, I should regard the dignity in avenging the
crime. Justice is grave and decorous, and in its punishments
rather seems to submit to a necessity than to make a choice.
Had Nero, or Agrippina, or Louis the Eleventh, or Charles the
Ninth, been the subject; if Charles the Twelfth of Sweden after
the murder of Patkul, or his predecessor Christina after the
murder of Monaldeschi, had fallen into your hands, sir, or into
mine, I am sure our conduct would have been different.
If the French King, or King of the French (or by whatever
name he is known in the new vocabulary of your constitution),
## p. 2807 (#379) ###########################################
EDMUND BURKE
2807
has in his own person and that of his Queen really deserved these
unavowed but unavenged murderous attempts, and those frequent
indignities more cruel than murder, such a person would ill de-
serve even that subordinate executory trust which I understand
is to be placed in him; nor is he fit to be called chief in a nation
which he has outraged and oppressed. A worse choice for such
an office in a new commonwealth than that of a deposed tyrant
could not possibly be made. But to degrade and insult a man
as the worst of criminals, and afterwards to trust him in your
highest concerns as a faithful, honest, and zealous servant, is not
consistent with reasoning, nor prudent in policy, nor safe in
practice. Those who could make such an appointment must be
guilty of a more flagrant breach of trust than any they have yet
committed against the people. As this is the only crime in
which your leading politicians could have acted inconsistently, I
conclude that there is no sort of ground for these horrid insin-
uations. I think no better of all the other calumnies.
In England, we give no credit to them. We are generous
enemies: we are faithful allies. We spurn from us with disgust
and indignation the slanders of those who bring us their anec-
dotes with the attestation of the flower-de-luce on their shoulder.
We have Lord George Gordon fast in Newgate; and neither his
being a public proselyte to Judaism, nor his having, in his zeal
against Catholic priests and all sorts of ecclesiastics, raised a mob
(excuse the term, it is still in use here) which pulled down all
our prisons, have preserved to him a liberty of which he did not
render himself worthy by a virtuous use of it. We have rebuilt
Newgate, and tenanted the mansion. We have prisons almost as
strong as the Bastile for those who dare to libel the Queens of
France. In this spiritual retreat let the noble libeler remain.
Let him there meditate on his Talmud, until he learns a conduct
more becoming his birth and parts, and not so disgraceful to the
ancient religion to which he has become a proselyte; or until
some persons from your side of the water, to please your new
Hebrew brethren, shall ransom him. He may then be enabled
to purchase, with the old hoards of the synagogue, and a very
small poundage on the long compound interest of the thirty pieces
of silver (Dr. Price has shown us what miracles compound interest
will perform in 1790 years), the lands which are lately discovered
to have been usurped by the Gallican Church. Send us your
Popish Archbishop of Paris, and we will send you our Protestant
## p. 2808 (#380) ###########################################
2808
EDMUND BURKE
Rabbin. We shall treat the person you send us in exchange like
a gentleman and an honest man, as he is; but pray let him
bring with him the fund of his hospitality, bounty, and charity;
and depend upon it, we shall never confiscate a shilling of that
honorable and pious fund, nor think of enriching the treasury
with the spoils of the poor-box.
To tell you the truth, my dear sir, I think the honor of our
nation to be somewhat concerned in the disclaimer of the pro-
ceedings of this society of the Old Jewry and the London Tavern.
I have no man's proxy. I speak only for myself when I dis.
claim, as I do with all possible earnestness, all communion with
the actors in that triumph, or with the admirers of it.
assert anything else, as concerning the people of England, I
speak from observation, not from authority; but I speak from the
experience I have had in a pretty extensive and mixed commu-
nication with the inhabitants of this kingdom, of all descriptions
and ranks, and after a course of attentive observation begun
early in life, and continued for nearly forty years. I have often
been astonished, considering that we are divided from you but by
a slender dike of about twenty-four miles, and that the mutual
intercourse between the two countries has lately been very great,
to find how little you seem to know of us. I suspect that this is
owing to your forming a judgment of this nation from certain
publications which do very erroneously, if they do at all, repre-
sent the opinions and dispositions generally prevalent in Eng.
land. The vanity, restlessness, petulance, and spirit of intrigue of
several petty cabals, who attempt to hide their total want of con-
sequence in bustle, and noise, and puffing, and mutual quotation
of each other, makes you imagine that our contemptuous neglect
of their abilities is a mark of general acquiescence in their
opinions. No such thing, I assure you. Because half a dozen
grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their impor-
tunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle reposed beneath the
shadow of the British oak chew the cud and are silent, pray do
not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhab-
itants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or
that after all they are other than the little, shriveled, meagre,
hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.
## p. 2809 (#381) ###########################################
2809
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
(1849-)
M
erness.
Rs. BURNETT has told the story of her childhood and tried to
interpret her own personality in her autobiographical story,
“The One I Knew Best of All. ' She has pictured a little
English girl in a comfortable Manchester home, leading a humdrum,
well-regulated existence, with brothers and sisters, nurse and gov-
But an alert imagination added interest to the life of this
« Small Person, and from her nursery windows and from the quiet
park where she played she watched eagerly for anything of dramatic
or picturesque interest. She seized upon the Lancashire dialect often
overheard, as upon a game, and practiced it until she gained the
facility of use shown in her mining and factory stories. One day the
strong and beautiful figure of a young woman, followed by a coarse
and abusive father, caught her attention, and years afterward she
developed Joan Lowrie from the incident.
When the Hodgson family suffered pecuniary loss, and hoping to
better its fortunes came to America, then best known to Frances
from the pages of Uncle Tom's Cabin, she was fifteen. A year or
two later she began to send her stories to various magazines. In
1867 the first of these appeared. She did not however attain her
great popularity until the appearance of That Lass o' Lowrie's)
in 1877. The thoughtfully drawn group of characters — Derrick
the engineer, Grace the young minister, Annie the rector's daughter,
and Joan the pit girl, - are dramatic figures, working out their life
problems under the eyes and the comments of half-cynical, half-
brutalized miners. There is nothing in her history to account for
Joan, or for the fact that the strength of vice in her father becomes
an equal strength of virtue in her. Abused since her babyhood, doing
the work of a man among degrading companionships, she yet remains
capable of the noblest self-abnegation. Mrs. Burnett delights in
heroes and heroines who are thus loftily at variance with their sur-
roundings. Her stories are romantic in spirit, offering little to the
lover of psychologic analysis. Her character-drawing is the product
of quick observation and sympathetic intuition. She does not
write «tendency novels, but appeals to simple emotions of love,
hate, revenge, or self-immolation, which sometimes, as in the case
of her last book, "A Lady of Quality' (1895), verge on sensational-
ism. In 1873 Miss Hodgson married Dr. Burnett of Washington. Her
## p. 2810 (#382) ###########################################
2810
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
longest novel, “Through One Administration,' is a story of the politi-
cal and social life of the Capital. Little Lord Fauntleroy' (1886) is
the best known of a series of stories nominally written for children,
but intended to be read by their elders. (Sara Crewe,' (Giovanni
and the Other,' 'Two Little Pilgrims, and Little Saint Elizabeth'
are chronicles of superlunary children. After those before mentioned,
(Esmeralda,' 'Louisiana,' (A Fair Barbarian,' and Haworth's) are
her best known stories.
AT THE PIT
From (That Lass o' Lowrie's )
TH
He next morning Derrick went down to the mine as usual.
There were several things he wished to do in these last
two days. He had heard that the managers had entered
into negotiations with a new engineer, and he wished the man
to find no half-done work. The day was bright and frosty, and
the sharp, bracing air seemed to clear his brain. He felt more
hopeful, and less inclined to view matters darkly.
He remembered afterward that as he stepped into the cage he
turned to look at the unpicturesque little town, brightened by the
winter's sun; and that as he went down he glanced up at the
sky, and marked how intense appeared the bit of blue which was
framed in by the mouth of the shaft.
Even in the few hours that had elapsed since the meeting,
the rumor of what he had said and done had been bruited about.
Some collier had heard it and had told it to his comrades, and so
it had gone from one to the other. It had been talked over at
the evening and morning meal in divers cottages, and many an
anxious hand had warmed into praise of the man who had had
a thowt for th' men. ”
In the first gallery he entered he found a deputation of men
awaiting him, --- a group of burly miners with picks and shovels
over their shoulders,- and the head of this deputation, a spokes-
man burlier and generally gruffer than the rest, stopped him.
“Mester,” he said, “we chaps 'ud loike to ha' a word wi' yo'. ”
« All right,” was Derrick's reply, “I am ready to listen. ”
The rest crowded nearer, as if anxious to participate as much
as possible, and give their spokesman the support of their pres-
ence.
## p. 2811 (#383) ###########################################
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
2811
“It is na mich as we ha' getten to say,” said the man, <but
we're fain to say it. Are na we, mates ? ”
“Ay, we are, lad,” in chorus.
“It's about summat as we'n heerd. Theer wur a chap as towd
some on us last neet as yo'd getten th’ sack fro' th’ managers —
or leastways as yo'd turned th' tables on 'em an' gi’en them th'
sack yo'rsen. An' we'n heerd as it begun wi' yo're standin' up
fur us chaps — axin' fur things as wur wanted i’ th’ pit to save
us fro' runnin' more risk than we need. An' we heerd as yo'
spoke up bold, an' argied for us an' stood to what yo’ thowt war
th' reet thing, an’ we set our moinds on tellin' yo' as we'd heerd
it an' talked it over, an' we'd loike to say a word o' thanks i’
common fur th' pluck yo' showed. Is na that it, mates ? »
“Ay, that it is, lad! ” responded the chorus.
Suddenly one of the group stepped out and threw down his
pick. “An' I'm dom’d, mates,” he said, “if here is na a chap as
ud loike to shake hands wi' him. ”
It was the signal for the rest to follow his example. They
crowded about their champion, thrusting grimy paws into his
hand, grasping it almost enthusiastically.
“Good luck to yo', lad! ” said one. “We'n noan smooth soart
o'chaps, but we'n stand by what's fair an' plucky. We shall
ha' a good word fur thee when tha hast made thy Aittin'. ”
"I'm glad of that, lads,” responded Derrick heartily, by no
means unmoved by the rough-and-ready spirit of the scene. I
only wish I had had better luck, that's all. "
A few hours later the whole of the little town was shaken to
its very foundations by something like an earthquake, accom-
panied by an ominous, booming sound which brought people
flocking out of their houses with white faces. Some of them
had heard it before — all knew what it meant. From the
colliers' cottages poured forth women, shrieking and wailing,-
women who bore children in their arms and had older ones
dragging at their skirts, and who made their desperate way to
the pit with one accord. From houses and workshops there
rushed men, who coming out in twos and threes joined each
other, and forming a breathless crowd, ran through the streets
scarcely daring to speak a word — and all ran toward the pit.
There were
at its mouth in five minutes; in ten
minutes there were hundreds, and above all the clamor rose the
cry of women:
(
scores
## p. 2812 (#384) ###########################################
2812
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
"My mester's down ! »
“An' mine! ”
"An' mine!
"Four lads o' mine is down! »
« Three o' mine! ”
“My little un's theer — th' youngest — nobbut ten year owd –
nobbut ten year owd, poor little chap! an'ony been at work a
week!
«Ay, wenches, God ha' mercy on us aw'— God ha’ mercy! ”
And then more shrieks and wails, in which the terror-stricken
children joined.
It was a fearful sight. How many lay dead and dying in
the noisome darkness below, God only knew! How many lay
mangled and crushed, waiting for their death, Heaven only could
tell!
In five minutes after the explosion occurred, a slight figure
in clerical garb made its way through the crowd with an air of
excited determination.
“Th' parson's feart," was the general comment.
"My men,” he said, raising his voice so that all could hear,
can any of you tell me who last saw Fergus Derrick ? »
There was a brief pause, and then came a reply from a col-
lier who stood near.
“I coom up out o'th' pit an hour ago,” he said, “I wur th'
last as coom up, an' it wur on'y chance as browt me. Derrick
wur wi' his men i'th' new part o' th’mine. I seed him as I
passed through. "
Grace's face became a shade or so paler, but he made no
more inquiries.
His friend either lay dead below, or was waiting for his doom
at that very moment. He stepped a little farther forward.
“Unfortunately for myself, at present,” he said, “I have no
practical knowledge of the nature of these accidents.
Will some
of you tell me how long it will be before we can make our first
effort to rescue the men who are below ? »
Did he mean to volunteer - this young whipper-snapper of a
parson? And if he did, could he know what he was doing ?
“I ask you,” he said, “because I wish to offer myself as a
volunteer at once; I think I am stronger than you imagine, and
at least my heart will be in the work. I have a friend below
myself,” his voice altering its tone and losing its firmness, -
(
## p. 2813 (#385) ###########################################
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
2813
«a friend who is worthy the sacrifice of ten such lives as mine, if
such a sacrifice could save him. ”
One or two of the older and more experienced spoke up.
Under an hour it would be impossible to make the attempt — it
might even be a longer time, but in an hour they might at least
make their first effort.
If such was the case, the parson said, the intervening period
must be turned to the best account. In that time much could
be thought of and done which would assist themselves and ben-
efit the sufferers. He called upon the strongest and most expe-
rienced, and almost without their recognizing the prominence
of his position, led them on in the work. He even rallied the
weeping women and gave them something to do. One was sent
for this necessary article and another for that. A couple of boys
were dispatched to the next village for extra medical assistance,
so that there need be no lack of attention when it was required.
He took off his broadcloth and worked with the rest of them
until all the necessary preparations were made, and it was con-
sidered possible to descend into the mine,
When all was ready, he went to the mouth of the shaft and
took his place quietly.
It was a hazardous task they had before them. Death would
stare them in the face all through its performance. There was
choking after-damp below,- noxious vapors, to breathe which
was to die; there was the chance of crushing masses falling
from the shaken galleries - and yet these men left their compan-
ions one by one, and ranged themselves without saying a word
at the curate's side.
“My friends," said Grace, baring his head and raising a fem-
inine hand, -"My friends, we will say a short prayer. "
It was only a few words. Then the curate spoke again.
Ready! ” he said.
But just at that moment there stepped out from the anguished
crowd a girl, whose face was set and deathly, though there was
no touch of fear upon it.
“I ax yo',” she said, “to let me go wi' yo' and do what I
con. Lasses, some on yo' speak a word for Joan Lowrie! »
There was a breathless start. The women even stopped their
outcry to look at her as she stood apart from them,-a desperate
appeal in the very quiet of her gesture as she turned to look
about her for some one to speak.
## p. 2814 (#386) ###########################################
2814
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
“Lasses,” she said again, “some on yo' speak a word for Joan
Lowrie !
There rose a murmur among them then, and the next instant
this murmur was a cry.
“Ay,” they answered, “we con aw speak fur yo'. Let her
go, lads! She's worth two o' th’ best on yo'. Nowt fears her.
Ay, she mun go, if she will, mun Joan Lowrie! Go, Joan lass,
and we'n not forget thee! ”
But the men demurred. The finer instinct of some of them
shrank from giving a woman a place in such a perilous under-
taking - the coarser element in others rebelled against it.
« We'n ha' no wenches,” these said, surlily.
Grace stepped forward. He went to Joan Lowrie and touched
her gently on the shoulder.
“We cannot think of it,” he said. “It is very brave and
generous, and
God bless you! but it cannot be. I could not
think of allowing it myself, if the rest would. ”
"Parson,” said Joan, coolly but not roughly, "thad ha' hard
work to help thysen, if so be as th' lads wur willin'! »
" But,” he protested, “it may be death. I could not bear the
thought of it. You are a woman. We cannot let you risk your
life. ”
mon
She turned to the volunteers.
