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Title: Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America
Author: Edmund Burke
Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5655]
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BURKE'S SPEECH
ON
CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA
EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES
BY
SIDNEY CARLETON NEWSOM
TEACHER OF ENGLISH, MANUAL TRAINING HIGH SCHOOL INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA
PREFACE
The introduction to this edition of Burke's speech on Conciliation with America
is intended to supply the needs of those students who do not have access to a
well-stocked library, or who, for any reason, are unable to do the collateral
reading necessary for a complete understanding of the text.
The sources from which information has been drawn in preparing this edition are
mentioned under "Bibliography." The editor wishes to acknowledge indebtedness to
many of the excellent older editions of the speech, and also to Mr. A. P.
Winston, of the Manual Training High School, for valuable suggestions.
CONTENTS
POLITICAL SITUATION
EDMUND BURKE
BURKE AS A STATESMAN
BURKE IN LITERATURE
TOPICS FOR SPECIAL REPORTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
SPEECH ON CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA
NOTES
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
POLITICAL SITUATION
In 1651 originated the policy which caused the American Revolution. That policy
was one of taxation, indirect, it is true, but none the less taxation. The first
Navigation Act required that colonial exports should be shipped to England in
American or English vessels. This was followed by a long series of acts,
regulating and restricting the American trade. Colonists were not allowed to
exchange certain articles without paying duties thereon, and custom houses were
established and officers appointed. Opposition to these proceedings was
ineffectual; and in 1696, in order to expedite the business of taxation, and to
establish a better method of ruling the colonies, a board was appointed, called
the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations. The royal governors found in
this board ready sympathizers, and were not slow to report their grievances, and
to insist upon more stringent regulations for enforcing obedience. Some of the
retaliative measures employed were the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus,
the abridgment of the freedom of the press and the prohibition of elections. But
the colonists generally succeeded in having their own way in the end, and were
not wholly without encouragement and sympathy in the English Parliament. It may
be that the war with France, which ended with the fall of Quebec, had much to do
with this rather generous treatment. The Americans, too, were favored by the
Whigs, who had been in power for more than seventy years. The policy of this
great party was not opposed to the sentiments and ideas of political freedom
that had grown up in the colonies; and, although more than half of the
Navigation Acts were passed by Whig governments, the leaders had known how to
wink at the violation of nearly all of them.
Immediately after the close of the French war, and after George III. had
ascended the throne of England, it was decided to enforce the Navigation Acts
rigidly. There was to be no more smuggling, and, to prevent this, Writs of
Assistance were issued. Armed with such authority, a servant of the king might
enter the home of any citizen, and make a thorough search for smuggled goods. It
is needless to say the measure was resisted vigorously, and its reception by the
colonists, and its effect upon them, has been called the opening scene of the
American Revolution. As a matter of fact, this sudden change in the attitude of
England toward the colonies, marks the beginning of the policy of George III.
which, had it been successful, would have made him the ruler of an absolute
instead of a limited monarchy. He hated the Tories only less than the Whigs, and
when he bestowed a favor upon either, it was for the purpose of weakening the
other. The first task he set himself was that of crushing the Whigs. Since the
Revolution of 1688, they had dictated the policy of the English government, and
through wise leaders had become supreme in authority. They were particularly
obnoxious to him because of their republican spirit, and he regarded their
ascendency as a constant menace to his kingly power. Fortune seemed to favor him
in the dissensions which arose. There grew up two factions in the Whig party.
There were old Whigs and new Whigs. George played one against the other,
advanced his favorites when opportunity offered, and in the end succeeded in
forming a ministry composed of his friends and obedient to his will.
With the ministry safely in hand, he turned his attention to the House of
Commons. The old Whigs had set an example, which George was shrewd enough to
follow. Walpole and Newcastle had succeeded in giving England one of the most
peaceful and prosperous governments within in the previous history of the
nation, but their methods were corrupt. With much of the judgment, penetration
and wise forbearance which marks a statesman, Walpole's distinctive qualities of
mind eminently fitted him for political intrigue; Newcastle was still worse, and
has the distinction of being the premier under whose administration the revolt
against official corruption first received the support of the public.
For near a hundred years, the territorial distribution of seats in the House had
remained the same, while the centres of population had shifted along with those
of trade and new industries. Great towns were without representation, while
boroughs, such as Old Sarum, without a single voter, still claimed, and had, a
seat in Parliament. Such districts, or "rotten boroughs," were owned and
controlled by many of the great landowners. Both Walpole and Newcastle resorted
to the outright purchase of these seats, and when the time came George did not
shrink from doing the same thing. He went even further. All preferments of
whatsoever sort were bestowed upon those who would do his bidding, and the
business of bribery assumed such proportions that an office was opened at the
Treasury for this purpose, from which twenty-five thousand pounds are said to
have passed in a single day. Parliament had been for a long time only partially
representative of the people; it now ceased to be so almost completely.
With, the support which such methods secured, along with encouragement from his
ministers, the king was prepared to put in operation his policy for regulating
the affairs of America. Writs of Assistance (1761) were followed by the passage
of the Stamp Act (1765). The ostensible object of both these measures was to
help pay the debt incurred by the French war, but the real purpose lay deeper,
and was nothing more or less than the ultimate extension of parliamentary rule,
in great things as well as small, to America. At this crisis, so momentous for
the colonists, the Rockingham ministry was formed, and Burke, together with
Pitt, supported a motion for the unconditional repeal of the Stamp Act. After
much wrangling, the motion was carried, and the first blunder of the mother
country seemed to have been smoothed over.
Only a few months elapsed, however, when the question of taxing the colonies was
revived. Pitt lay ill, and could take no part in the proposed measure. Through
the influence of other members of his party,--notably Townshend,--a series of
acts were passed, imposing duties on several exports to America. This was
followed by a suspension of the New York Assembly, because it had disregarded
instructions in the matter of supplies for the troops. The colonists were
furious. Matters went from bad to worse. To withdraw as far as possible without
yielding the principle at stake, the duties on all the exports mentioned in the
bill were removed, except that on tea. But it was precisely the principle for
which the colonists were contending. They were not in the humor for compromise,
when they believed their freedom was endangered, and the strength and
determination of their resistance found a climax in the Boston Tea Party.
In the meantime, Lord North, who was absolutely obedient to the king, had become
prime minister. Five bills were prepared, the tenor of which, it was thought,
would overawe the colonists. Of these, the Boston Port Bill and the Regulating
Act are perhaps the most famous, though the ultimate tendency of all was blindly
coercive.
While the king and his friends were busy with these, the opposition proposed an
unconditional repeal of the Tea Act. The bill was introduced only to be
overwhelmingly defeated by the same Parliament that passed the five measures of
Lord North.
In America, the effect of these proceedings was such as might have been expected
by thinking men. The colonies were as a unit in their support of Massachusetts.
The Regulating Act was set at defiance, public officers in the king's service
were forced to resign, town meetings were held, and preparations for war were
begun in dead earnest. To avert this, some of England's greatest statesmen--Pitt
among the number--asked for a reconsideration. On February the first, 1775, a
bill was introduced, which would have gone far toward bringing peace. One month
later, Burke delivered his speech on Conciliation with the Colonies.
EDMUND BURKE
There is nothing unusual in Burke's early life. He was born in Dublin, Ireland,
in 1729. His father was a successful lawyer and a Protestant, his mother, a
Catholic. At the age of twelve, he became a pupil of Abraham Shackleton, a
Quaker, who had been teaching some fifteen years at Ballitore, a small town
thirty miles from Dublin. In after years Burke was always pleased to speak of
his old friend in the kindest way: "If I am anything," he declares, "it is the
education I had there that has made me so." And again at Shackleton's death,
when Burke was near the zenith of his fame and popularity, he writes: "I had a
true honor and affection for that excellent man. I feel something like a
satisfaction in the midst of my concern, that I was fortunate enough to have him
under my roof before his departure." It can hardly be doubted that the old
Quaker schoolmaster succeeded with his pupil who was already so favorably
inclined, and it is more than probable that the daily example of one who lived
out his precepts was strong in its influence upon a young and generous mind.
Burke attended school at Ballitore two years; then, at the age of fourteen, he
became a student at Trinity College, Dublin, and remained there five years. At
college he was unsystematic and careless of routine. He seems to have done
pretty much as he pleased, and, however methodical he became in after life, his
study during these five years was rambling and spasmodic. The only definite
knowledge we have of this period is given by Burke himself in letters to his
former friend Richard Shackleton, son of his old schoolmaster. What he did was
done with a zest that at times became a feverish impatience: "First I was
greatly taken with natural philosophy, which, while I should have given my mind
to logic, employed me incessantly. This I call my FUROR MATHEMATICUS." Following
in succession come his FUROR LOGICUS, FUROR HISTORICUS, and FUROR PEOTICUS, each
of which absorbed him for the time being. It would be wrong, however, to think
of Burke as a trifler even in his youth. He read in the library three hours
every day and we may be sure he read as intelligently as eagerly. It is more
than probable that like a few other great minds he did not need a rigid system
to guide him. If he chose his subjects of study at pleasure, there is every
reason to believe he mastered them.
Of intimate friends at the University we hear nothing. Goldsmith came one year
later, but there is no evidence that they knew each other. It is probable that
Burke, always reserved, had little in common with his young associates. His own
musings, with occasional attempts at writing poetry, long walks through the
country, and frequent letters to and from Richard Shackleton, employed him when
not at his books.
Two years after taking his degree, Burke went to London and established himself
at the Middle Temple for the usual routine course in law. Another long period
passes of which there is next to nothing known. His father, an irascible, hot-
tempered man, had wished him to begin the practice of law, but Burke seems to
have continued in a rather irregular way pretty much as when an undergraduate at
Dublin. His inclinations were not toward the law, but literature. His father,
angered at such a turn of affairs, promptly reduced his allowance and left him
to follow his natural bent in perfect freedom. In 1756, six years after his
arrival in London, and almost immediately following the rupture with his father,
he married a Miss Nugent. At about the same time he published his first two
books, [Footnote: A Vindication of Natural Society and Philosophical Inquiry
into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful] and began in earnest
the life of an author.
He attracted the attention of literary men. Dr. Johnson had just completed his
famous dictionary, and was the centre of a group of writers who accepted him at
his own valuation. Burke did not want for company, and wrote
copiously.[Footnote: Hints for an Essay on the Drama. Abridgement of the History
of England] He became associated with Dodsley, a bookseller, who began
publishing the Annual Register in 1759, and was paid a hundred pounds a year for
writing upon current events. He spent two years (1761-63) in Ireland in the
employment of William Hamilton, but at the end of that time returned, chagrined
and disgusted with his would-be patron, who utterly failed to recognize Burke's
worth, and persisted in the most unreasonable demands upon his time and energy.
For once Burke's independence served him well. In 1765 Lord Rockingham became
prime minister, and Burke, widely known as the chief writer for the Annual
Register, was free to accept the position of private secretary, which Lord
Rockingham was glad to offer him. His services here were invaluable. The new
relations thus established did not end with the performance of the immediate
duties of his office, but a warm friendship grew up between the two, which
lasted till the death of Lord Rockingham. While yet private secretary, Burke was
elected to Parliament from the borough of Wendover. It was through the influence
of his friend, or perhaps relative, William Burke, that his election was
secured.
Only a few days after taking his seat in the House of Commons, Burke made his
first speech, January 27, 1766. He followed this in a very short time with
another upon the same subject--the Taxation of the American Colonies.
Notwithstanding the great honor and distinction which these first speeches
brought Burke, his party was dismissed at the close of the session and the
Chatham ministry formed. He remained with his friends, and employed himself in
refuting [Footnote: Observations on the Present State of the Nation] the charges
of the former minister, George Grenville, who wrote a pamphlet accusing his
successors of gross neglect of public duties.
At this point in his life comes the much-discussed matter of Beaconsfield. How
Burke became rich enough to purchase such expensive property is a question that
has never been answered by his friends or enemies. There are mysterious hints of
successful speculation in East India stock, of money borrowed, and Burke
himself, in a letter to Shackleton, speaks of aid from his friends and "all [the
money] he could collect of his own." However much we may regret the air of
mystery surrounding the matter, and the opportunity given those ever ready to
smirch a great man's character, it is not probable that any one ever really
doubted Burke's integrity in this or any other transaction. Perhaps the true
explanation of his seemingly reckless extravagance (if any explanation is
needed) is that the conventional standards of his time forced it upon him; and
it may be that Burke himself sympathized to some extent with these standards,
and felt a certain satisfaction in maintaining a proper attitude before the
public.
The celebrated case of Wilkes offered an opportunity for discussing the narrow
and corrupt policy pursued by George III. and his followers. Wilkes, outlawed
for libel and protected in the meantime through legal technicalities, was
returned to Parliament by Middlesex. The House expelled him. He was repeatedly
elected and as many times expelled, and finally the returns were altered, the
House voting its approval by a large majority. In 1770 Burke published his
pamphlet [Footnote: Present Discontents] in which he discussed the situation.
For the first time he showed the full sweep and breadth of his understanding.
His tract was in the interest of his party, but it was written in a spirit far
removed from narrow partisanship. He pointed out with absolute clearness the
cause of dissatisfaction and unrest among the people and charged George III. and
his councillors with gross indifference to the welfare of the nation and
corresponding devotion to selfish interests. He contended that Parliament was
usurping privileges when it presumed to expel any one, that the people had a
right to send whomsoever they pleased to Parliament, and finally that "in all
disputes between them and their rulers, the presumption was at least upon a par
in favor of the people." From this time until the American Revolution, Burke
used every opportunity to denounce the policy which the king was pursuing at
home and abroad. He doubtless knew beforehand that what he might say would pass
unnoticed, but he never faltered in a steadfast adherence to his ideas of
government, founded, as he believed, upon the soundest principles. Bristol
elected him as its representative in Parliament. It was a great honor and Burke
felt its significance, yet he did not flinch when the time came for him to take
a stand. He voted for the removal of some of the restrictions upon Irish trade.
His constituents, representing one of the most prosperous mercantile districts,
angered and disappointed at what they held to be a betrayal of trust, refused to
reelect him.
Lord North's ministry came to an end in 1782, immediately after the battle of
Yorktown, and Lord Rockingham was chosen prime minister. Burke's past services
warranted him in expecting an important place in the cabinet, but he was
ignored. Various things have been suggested as reasons for this: he was poor;
some of his relations and intimate associates were objectionable; there were
dark hints of speculations; he was an Irishman. It is possible that any one of
these facts, or all of them, furnished a good excuse for not giving him an
important position in the new government. But it seems more probable that
Burke's abilities were not appreciated so justly as they have been since. The
men with whom he associated saw some of his greatness but not all of it. He was
assigned the office of Paymaster of Forces, a place of secondary importance.
Lord Rockingham died in three months and the party went to pieces. Burke refused
to work under Shelburne, and, with Fox, joined Lord North in forming the
coalition which overthrew the Whig party. Burke has been severely censured for
the part he took in this. Perhaps there is little excuse for his desertion, and
it is certainly true that his course raises the question of his sincere devotion
to principles. His personal dislike of Shelburne was so intense that he may have
yielded to his feelings. He felt hurt, too, we may be sure, at the disposition
made of him by his friends. In replying to a letter asking him for a place in
the new government, he writes that his correspondent has been misinformed. "I
make no part of the ministerial arrangement," he writes, and adds, "Something in
the official line may be thought fit for my measure."
As a supporter of the coalition, Burke was one of the framers of the India Bill.
This was directed against the wholesale robbery and corruption which the East
India Company had been guilty of in its government of the country. Both Fox and
Burke defended the measure with all the force and power which a thorough mastery
of facts, a keen sense of the injustice done an unhappy people, and a splendid
rhetoric can give. But it was doomed from the first. The people at large were
indifferent, many had profitable business relations with the company, and the
king used his personal influence against it. The bill failed to pass, the
coalition was dismissed, and the party, which had in Burke its greatest
representative, was utterly ruined.
The failure of the India Bill marked a victory for the king, and it also
prepared the way for one of the most famous transactions of Burke's life.
Macaulay has told how impressive and magnificent was the scene at the trial of
Warren Hastings. There were political reasons for the impeachment, but the chief
motive that stirred Burke was far removed from this. He saw and understood the
real state of affairs in India. The mismanagement, the brutal methods, and the
crimes committed there in the name of the English government, moved him
profoundly, and when he rose before the magnificent audience at Westminster, for
opening the cause, he forced his hearers, by his own mighty passion, to see with
his own eyes, and to feel his own righteous anger. "When he came to his two
narratives," says Miss Burney, "when he related the particulars of those
dreadful murders, he interested, he engaged, he at last overpowered me; I felt
my cause lost. I could hardly keep my seat. My eyes dreaded a single glance
toward a man so accused as Mr. Hastings; I wanted to sink on the floor, that
they might be saved so painful a sight. I had no hope he could clear himself;
not another wish in his favor remained." The trial lasted for six years and
ended with the acquittal of Hastings. The result was not a surprise, and least
of all to Burke. The fate of the India Bill had taught him how completely
indifferent the popular mind was to issues touching deep moral questions. Though
a seeming failure, he regarded the impeachment as the greatest work of his life.
It did much to arouse and stimulate the national sense of justice. It made clear
the cruel methods sometimes pursued under the guise of civilization and
progress. The moral victory is claimed for Burke, and without a doubt the claim
is valid.
The second of the great social and political problems, which employed English
statesmen in the last half of the eighteenth century, was settled in the
impeachment of Warren Hastings. The affairs of America and India were now
overshadowed by the French Revolution, and Burke, with the far-sighted vision of
a veteran statesman, watched the progress of events and their influence upon the
established order. In 1773 he had visited France, and had returned displeased.
It is remarkable with what accuracy he pointed out the ultimate tendency of much
that he saw. A close observer of current phases of society, and on the alert to
explain them in the light of broad and fundamental principles of human progress,
he had every opportunity for studying social life at the French capital. Unlike
the younger men of his times, he was doubtful, and held his judgment in
suspense. The enthusiasm of even Fox seemed premature, and he held himself aloof
from the popular demonstrations of admiration and approval that were everywhere
going on. The fact is, Burke was growing old, and with his years he was becoming
more conservative. He dreaded change, and was suspicious of the wisdom of those
who set about such widespread innovations, and made such brilliant promises for
the future. But the time rapidly approached for him to declare himself, and in
1790 his Reflections on the Revolution in France was issued. His friends had
long waited its appearance, and were not wholly surprised at the position taken.
What did surprise them was the eagerness with which the people seized upon the
book, and its effect upon them. The Tories, with the king, applauded long and
loud; the Whigs were disappointed, for Burke condemned the Revolution
unreservedly, and with a bitterness out of all proportion to the cause of his
anxiety and fear. As the Revolution progressed, he grew fiercer in his
denunciation. He broke with his lifelong associates, and declared that no one
who sympathized with the work of the Assembly could be his friend. His other
writings on the Revolution [Footnote: Letter to a Member of the National
Assembly and Letters on a Regicide Peace.] were in a still more violent strain,
and it is hard to think of them as coming from the author of the Speech on
Conciliation.
Three years before his death, at the conclusion of the trial of Warren Hastings,
Burke's last term in Parliament expired. He did not wish office again and
withdrew to his estate. Through the influence of friends, and because of his
eminent services, it was proposed to make him peer, with the title of Lord
Beacons field. But the death of his son prevented, and a pension of twenty-five
hundred pounds a year was given instead. It was a signal for his enemies, and
during his last days he was busy with his reply. The "Letter to a Noble Lord,"
though written little more than a year before his death, is considered one of
the most perfect of his papers. Saddened by the loss of his son, and broken in
spirits, there is yet left him enough old-time energy and fire to answer his
detractors. But his wonderful career was near its close. His last months were
spent in writing about the French Revolution, and the third letter on a Regicide
Peace--a fragment--was doubtless composed just before his death. On the 9th of
July, 1797, he passed away. His friends claimed for him a place in Westminster,
but his last wish was respected, and he was buried at Beaconsfield.
BURKE AS A STATESMAN
There is hardly a political tract or pamphlet of Burke's in which he does not
state, in terms more or less clear, the fundamental principle in his theory of
government. "Circumstances," he says in one place, "give, in reality, to every
political principle, its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The
circumstances are what renders every civil and political scheme beneficial or
obnoxious to mankind." At another time he exclaims: "This is the true touchstone
of all theories which regard man and the affairs of men; does it suit his nature
in general, does it suit his nature as modified by his habits?" And again he
extends his system to affairs outside the realm of politics. "All government,"
he declares, "indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every
prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter."
It is clear that Burke thought the State existed for the people, and not the
people for the State. The doctrine is old to us, but it was not so in Burke's
time, and it required courage to expound it. The great parties had forgotten the
reason for their existence, and one of them had become hardened and blinded by
that corruption which seems to follow long tenure of office. The affairs of
India, Ireland, and America gave excellent opportunity for an exhibition of
English statesmanship, but in each case the policy pursued was dictated, not by
a clear perception of what was needed in these countries, but by narrow
selfishness, not unmixed with dogmatism of the most challenging sort. The
situation in India, as regards climate, character, and institutions, counted for
little in the minds of those who were growing rich as agents of the East India
Company. Much the same may be said of America and Ireland. The sense of
Parliament, influenced by the king, was to use these parts of the British Empire
in raising a revenue, and in strengthening party organization at home. In
opposing this policy, Burke lost his seat as representative for Bristol, then
the second city of England; spent fourteen of the best years of his life in
conducting the impeachment of Warren Hastings, Governor-General of India; and,
greatest of all, delivered his famous speeches on Taxation and Conciliation, in
behalf of the American colonists.
Notwithstanding the distinctly modern tone of Burke's ideas, it would be wrong
to think of him as a thoroughgoing reformer. He has been called the Great
Conservative, and the title is appropriate. He would have shrunk from a purely
republican form of government, such as our own, and it is, perhaps, a fact that
he was suspicious of a government by the people. The trouble, as he saw it, lay
with the representatives of the people. Upon them, as guardians of a trust,
rested the responsibility of protecting those whom they were chosen to serve.
While he bitterly opposed any measures involving radical change in the
Constitution, he was no less ardent in denouncing political corruptions of all
kinds whatsoever. In his Economical Reform he sought to curtail the enormous
extravagance of the royal household, and to withdraw the means of wholesale
bribery, which offices at the disposal of the king created. He did not believe
that a more effective means than this lay in the proposed plan for a
redistribution of seats in the House of Commons. In one place, he declared it
might be well to lessen the number of voters, in order to add to their weight
and independence; at another, he asks that the people be stimulated to a more
careful scrutiny of the conduct of their representatives; and on every occasion
he demands that the legislators give their support to those measures only which
have for their object the good of the whole people.
It is obvious, however, that Burke's policy had grievous faults. His reverence
for the past, and his respect for existing institutions as the heritage of the
past, made him timid and overcautious in dealing with abuses. Although he stood
with Pitt in defending the American colonies, he had no confidence in the
thoroughgoing reforms which the great Commoner proposed. When the Stamp Act was
repealed, Pitt would have gone even further. He would have acknowledged the
absolute injustice of taxation without representation. Burke held tenaciously to
the opposing theory, and warmly supported the Declaratory Act, which "asserted
the supreme authority of Parliament over the colonies, in all cases whatsoever."
His support of the bill for the repeal of the Stamp Act, as well as his plea for
reconciliation, ten years later, were not prompted by a firm belief in the
injustice of England's course. He expressly states, in both cases that to
enforce measures so repugnant to the Americans, would be detrimental to the home
government. It would result in confusion and disorder, and would bring, perhaps,
in the end, open rebellion. All of his speeches on American affairs show his
willingness to "barter and compromise" in order to avoid this, but nowhere is
there a hint of fundamental error in the Constitution. This was sacred to him,
and he resented to the last any proposition looking to an organic change in its
structure. "The lines of morality," he declared, "are not like ideal lines of
mathematics. They are broad and deep, as well as long. They admit of exceptions;
they demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are made, not by
the process of logic, but the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only first in
rank of all the virtues, political and moral, but she is the director, the
regulator, the standard of them all."
The chief characteristics, then, of Burke's political philosophy are opposed to
much that is fundamental in modern systems. His doctrine is better than that of
George III, because it is more generous, and affords opportunity for superficial
readjustment and adaptation. It is this last, or rather the proof it gives of
his insight, that has secured Burke so high a place among English statesmen.
A GROUP OF WRITERS COMING IMMEDIATELY BEFORE BURKE
Addison. . . . 1672-1719
Steele . . . . 1672-1729
Defoe. . . . . 1661-1731
Swift. . . . . 1667-1745
Pope . . . . . 1688-1744
Richardson . . 1689-1761
A GROUP OF WRITERS CONTEMPORARY WITH BURKE
Johnson . . . . 1709-1784
Goldsmith . . . 1728-1774
Fielding. . . . 1707-1754
Sterne. . . . . 1713-1768
Smollett. . . . 1721-1771
Gray. . . . . . 1716-1771
Boswell . . . . 1740-1795
BURKE IN LITERATURE
It has become almost trite to speak of the breadth of Burke's sympathies. We
should examine the statement, however, and understand its significance and see
its justice. While he must always be regarded first as a statesman of one of the
highest types, he had other interests than those directly suggested by his
office, and in one of these, at least, he affords an interesting and profitable
study.
To the student of literature Burke's name must always suggest that of Johnson
and Goldsmith. It was eight years after Burke's first appearance as an author,
that the famous Literary Club was formed. At first it was the intention to limit
the club to a membership of nine, and for a time this was adhered to. The
original members were Johnson, Burke, Goldsmith, Reynolds, and Hawkins. Garrick,
Pox, and Boswell came in later. Macaulay declares that the influence of the club
was so great that its verdict made and unmade reputations; but the thing most
interesting to us does not lie in the consideration of such literary
dictatorship. To Boswell we owe a biography of Johnson which has immortalized
its subject, and shed lustre upon all associated with him. The literary history
of the last third of the eighteenth century, with Johnson as a central figure,
is told nowhere else with such accuracy, or with better effect.
Although a Tory, Johnson was a great one, and his lasting friendship for Burke
is an enduring evidence of his generosity and great-mindedness. For twenty
years, and longer, they were eminent men in opposing parties, yet their mutual
respect and admiration continued to the last. To Burke, Johnson was a writer of
"eminent literary merit" and entitled to a pension "solely on that account." To
Johnson, Burke was the greatest man of his age, wrong politically, to be sure,
yet the only one "whose common conversation corresponded to the general fame
which he had in the world"--the only one "who was ready, whatever subject was
chosen, to meet you on your own ground." Here and there in the Life are
allusions to Burke, and admirable estimates of his many-sided character.
Coming directly to an estimate of Burke from the purely literary point of view,
it must be borne in mind that the greater part of his writings was prepared for
an audience. Like Macaulay, his prevailing style suggests the speaker, and his
methods throughout are suited to declamation and oratory. He lacks the ease and
delicacy that we are accustomed to look for in the best prose writers, and
occasionally one feels the justice of Johnson's stricture, that "he sometimes
talked partly from ostentation", or of Hazlitt's criticism that he seemed to be
"perpetually calling the speaker out to dance a minuet with him before he
begins."
There may be passages here and there that warrant such censure. Burke is
certainly ornate, and at times he is extremely self-conscious, but the dominant
quality of his style, and the one which forever contradicts the idea of mere
showiness, is passion. In his method of approaching a subject, he may be, and
perhaps is, rather tedious, but when once he has come to the matter really in
hand, he is no longer the rhetorician, dealing in fine phrases, but the great
seer, clothing his thoughts in words suitable and becoming. The most magnificent
passages in his writings--the Conciliation is rich in them--owe their charm and
effectiveness to this emotional capacity. They were evidently written in moments
of absolute abandonment to feeling--in moments when he was absorbed in the
contemplation of some great truth, made luminous by his own unrivalled powers.
Closely allied to this intensity of passion, is a splendid imaginative quality.
Few writers of English prose have such command of figurative expression. It must
be said, however, that Burke was not entirely free from the faults which
generally accompany an excessive use of figures. Like other great masters of a
decorative style, he frequently becomes pompous and grandiloquent. His thought,
too, is obscured, where we would expect great clearness of statement,
accompanied by a dignified simplicity; and occasionally we feel that he forgets
his subject in an anxious effort to make an impression. Though there are
passages in his writings that justify such observations, they are few in number,
when compared with those which are really masterpieces of their kind.
Some great crisis, or threatening state of affairs, seems to furnish the
necessary condition for the exercise of a great mind, and Burke is never so
effective as when thoroughly aroused. His imagination needed the chastening
which only a great moment or critical situation could give. Two of his greatest
speeches--Conciliation, and Impeachment of Warren Hastings--were delivered under
the restraining effect of such circumstances, and in each the figurative
expression is subdued and not less beautiful in itself than, appropriate for the
occasion.
Finally, it must be observed that no other writer of English prose has a better
command of words. His ideas, as multifarious as they are, always find fitting
expression. He does not grope for a term; it stands ready for his thought, and
one feels that he had opportunity for choice. It is the exuberance of his fancy,
already mentioned, coupled with this richness of vocabulary, that helped to make
Burke a tiresome speaker. His mind was too comprehensive to allow any phase of
his subject to pass without illumination. He followed where his subject led him,
without any great attention to the patience of his audience. But he receives
full credit when his speeches are read. It is then that his mastery of the
subject and the splendid qualities of his style are apparent, and appreciated at
their worth.
In conclusion, it is worth while observing that in the study of a great
character, joined with an attempt to estimate it by conventional standards,
something must always be left unsaid. Much may be learned of Burke by knowing
his record as a partisan, more by a minute inspection of his style as a writer,
but beyond all this is the moral tone or attitude of the man himself. To a
student of Burke this is the greatest thing about him. It colored every line he
wrote, and to it, more than anything else, is due the immense force of the man
as a speaker and writer. It was this, more than Burke's great abilities, that
justifies Dr. Johnson's famous eulogy: "He is not only the first man in the
House of Commons, he is the first man everywhere."
A GROUP OF WRITERS COMING IMMEDIATELY AFTER BURKE
Wordsworth . . . . 1770-1850
Coleridge . . . . . 1772-1834
Byron . . . . . . . 1788-1824
Shelley . . . . . . 1792-1822
Keats . . . . . . . 1795-1821
Scott . . . . . . . 1771-1832
TOPICS FOR SPECIAL REPORTS
1. "Like Goldsmith, though in a different sphere, Burke belongs both to the old
order and the new." Discuss that statement.
2. Burke and the Literary Club. (Boswell's Life of Johnson.)
3. Lives of Burke and Goldsmith. Contrast.
4. An interpretation of ten apothegms selected from the Speech on Conciliation.
5. A study of figures in the Speech on Conciliation.
6. A definition of the terms: "colloquialism" and "idiom" Instances of their use
in the Speech on Conciliation.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Burke's Life. John Morley. English Men of Letters Series.
2. Burke. John Morley. An Historical Study.
3. Burke. John Morley. Encyclopaedia Britannica.
4. History of the English People. Green. Vol. IV., pp 193-271.
5 History of Civilization in England. Buckle. Vol I, pp. 326-338
6. The American Revolution. Fiske. Vol. I, Chaps. I., II.
7. Life of Johnson. Boswell. (Use the Index)
EDMUND BURKE
ON MOVING HIS RESOLUTIONS FOR CONCILIATION WITH THE COLONIES. HOUSE OF COMMONS,
MARCH 22, 1775
I hope, Sir, that notwithstanding the austerity of the Chair, your good nature
will incline you to some degree of indulgence towards human frailty. You will
not think it unnatural that those who have an object depending, which strongly
engages their hopes and fears, should be somewhat inclined to superstition. As I
came into the House full of anxiety about the event of my motion, I found, to my
infinite surprise, that the grand penal bill, [Footnote: 1] by which we had
passed sentence on the trade and sustenance of America, is to be returned to us
from the other House. I do confess I could not help looking on this event as a
fortunate omen. I look upon it as a sort of providential favor, by which we are
put once more in possession of our deliberative capacity upon a business so very
questionable in its nature, so very uncertain in its issue. By the return of
this bill, which seemed to have taken its flight forever, we are at this very
instant nearly as free to choose a plan for our American Government as we were
on the first day of the session. If, Sir, we incline to the side of
conciliation, we are not at all embarrassed (unless we please to make ourselves
so) by any incongruous mixture of coercion and restraint. We are therefore
called upon, as it were by a superior warning voice, again to attend to America;
to attend to the whole of it together; and to review the subject with an unusual
degree of care and calmness.
Surely it is an awful subject, or there is none so on this side of the grave.
When I first had the honor [Footnote: 2] of a seat in this House, the affairs of
that continent pressed themselves upon us as the most important and most
delicate object of Parliamentary attention. My little share in this great
deliberation oppressed me. I found myself a partaker in a very high trust; and,
having no sort of reason to rely on the strength of my natural abilities for the
proper execution of that trust, I was obliged to take more than common pains to
instruct myself in everything which relates to our Colonies. I was not less
under the necessity of forming some fixed ideas concerning the general policy of
the British Empire. Something of this sort seemed to be indispensable, in order,
amidst so vast a fluctuation of passions and opinions, to concentre my thoughts,
to ballast my conduct, to preserve me from being blown about by every wind of
fashionable doctrine. I really did not think it safe or manly to have fresh
principles to seek upon every fresh mail which should arrive from America.
At that period I had the fortune to find myself in perfect concurrence with a
large majority in this House. Bowing under that high authority, and penetrated
with the sharpness and strength of that early impression, I have continued ever
since, without the least deviation, in my original sentiments. [Footnote: 3]
Whether this be owing to an obstinate perseverance in error, or to a religious
adherence to what appears to me truth, and reason, it is in your equity to
judge.
Sir, Parliament having an enlarged view of objects, made, during this interval,
more frequent changes in their sentiments and their conduct than could be
justified in a particular person upon the contracted scale of private
information. But though I do not hazard anything approaching to a censure on the
motives of former Parliaments to all those alterations, one fact is undoubted--
that under them the state of America has been kept in continual agitation.
[Footnote: 4] Everything administered as remedy to the public complaint, if it
did not produce, was at least followed by, an heightening of the distemper;
until, by a variety of experiments, that important country has been brought into
her present situation--a situation which I will not miscall, which I dare not
name, which I scarcely know how to comprehend in the terms of any description.
In this posture, Sir, things stood at the beginning of the session. About that
time, a worthy member [Footnote: 5] of great Parliamentary experience, who, in
the year 1766, filled the chair of the American committee with much ability,
took me aside; and, lamenting the present aspect of our politics, told me things
were come to such a pass that our former [Footnote: 6] methods of proceeding in
the House would be no longer tolerated: that the public tribunal (never too
indulgent to a long and unsuccessful opposition) would now scrutinize our
conduct with unusual severity: that the very vicissitudes and shiftings of
Ministerial measures, instead of convicting their authors of inconstancy and
want of system, would be taken as an occasion of charging us with a
predetermined discontent, which nothing could satisfy; whilst we accused every
measure of vigor as cruel, and every proposal of lenity as weak and irresolute.
The public, he said, would not have patience to see us play the game out with
our adversaries; we must produce our hand. It would be expected that those who
for many years had been active in such affairs should show that they had formed
some clear and decided idea of the principles of Colony government; and were
capable of drawing out something like a platform of the ground which might be
laid for future and permanent tranquillity.
I felt the truth of what my honorable friend represented; but I felt my
situation too. His application might have been made with far greater propriety
to many other gentlemen. No man was indeed ever better disposed, or worse
qualified, for such an undertaking than myself. Though I gave so far in to his
opinion that I immediately threw my thoughts into a sort of Parliamentary form,
I was by no means equally ready to produce them. It generally argues some degree
of natural impotence of mind, or some want of knowledge of the world, to hazard
plans of government except from a seat of authority. Propositions are made, not
only ineffectually, but somewhat disreputably, when the minds of men are not
properly disposed for their reception; and, for my part, I am not ambitious of
ridicule--not absolutely a candidate for disgrace
Besides, Sir, to speak the plain truth, I have in general no very exalted
opinion of the virtue of paper government; [Footnote: 7] nor of any politics in
which the plan is to be wholly separated from the execution. But when I saw that
anger and violence prevailed every day more and more, and that things were
hastening towards an incurable alienation of our Colonies, I confess my caution
gave way. I felt this as one of those few moments in which decorum yields to a
higher duty. Public calamity is a mighty leveller; and there are occasions when
any, even the slightest, chance of doing good must be laid hold on, even by the
most inconsiderable person.
To restore order and repose to an empire so great and so distracted as ours, is,
merely in the attempt, an undertaking that would ennoble the flights of the
highest genius, and obtain pardon for the efforts of the meanest understanding.
Struggling a good while with these thoughts, by degrees I felt myself more firm.
I derived, at length, some confidence from what in other circumstances usually
produces timidity. I grew less anxious, even from the idea of my own
insignificance. For, judging of what you are by what you ought to be, I
persuaded myself that you would not reject a reasonable proposition because it
had nothing but its reason to recommend it. On the other hand, being totally
destitute of all shadow of influence, natural or adventitious, I was very sure
that, if my proposition were futile or dangerous--if it were weakly conceived,
or improperly timed--there was nothing exterior to it of power to awe, dazzle,
or delude you. You will see it just as it is; and you will treat it just as it
deserves.
The proposition is peace. Not peace through the medium of war; not peace to be
hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations; not peace to
arise out of universal discord fomented, from principle, in all parts of the
Empire, not peace to depend on the juridical determination of perplexing
questions, or the precise marking the shadowy boundaries of a complex
government. It is simple peace; sought in its natural course, and in its
ordinary haunts. It is peace sought in the spirit of peace, and laid in
principles purely pacific. I propose, by removing the ground of the difference,
and by restoring the former unsuspecting confidence of the Colonies in the
Mother Country, 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 [Footnote: 8] 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,
therefore, 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 [Footnote: 9] which has been lately laid
upon your table by the noble lord in the blue ribbon. [Footnote: 10] It does not
propose to fill your lobby with squabbling Colony agents, [Footnote: 11] 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.
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, [Footnote: 12] 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 farther; it has declared conciliation admissible, 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 unwise, 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,
indeed, wholly alien from all the ancient methods and forms of Parliament.
The principle of this proceeding is large enough for my purpose. 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 acknowledged 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 with 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, [Footnote: 13] 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 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, [Footnote: 14] and not according to our own
imaginations, nor according to abstract ideas of right--by no means according to
mere general theories of government, the resort to which appears to me, in our
present situation, 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.
The first thing that we have to consider with regard to the nature of the object
is--the number of people in the Colonies. I have taken for some years a good
deal of pains on that point. I can by no calculation justify myself in placing
the number below two millions of inhabitants of our own European blood and
color, besides at least five hundred thousand others, who form no inconsiderable
part of the strength and opulence of the whole. This, Sir, is, I believe, about
the true number. There is no occasion to exaggerate where plain truth is of so
much weight and importance. But whether I put the present numbers too high or
too low is a matter of little moment. Such is the strength with which population
shoots in that part of the world, that, state the numbers as high as we will,
whilst the dispute continues, the exaggeration ends. Whilst we are discussing
any given magnitude, they are grown to it. Whilst we spend our time in
deliberating on the mode of governing two millions, we shall find we have
millions more to manage. Your children do not grow faster from infancy to
manhood than they spread from families to communities, and from villages to
nations.
I put this consideration of the present and the growing numbers in the front of
our deliberation, because, Sir, this consideration will make it evident to a
blunter discernment than yours, that no partial, narrow, contracted, pinched,
occasional system will be at all suitable to such an object. It will show you
that it is not to be considered as one of those minima which are out of the eye
and consideration of the law; not a paltry excrescence of the state; not a mean
dependent, who may be neglected with little damage and provoked with little
danger. It will prove that some degree of care and caution is required in the
handling such an object; it will show that you ought not, in reason, to trifle
with so large a mass of the interests and feelings of the human race. You could
at no time do so without guilt; and be assured you will not be able to do it
long with impunity.
But the population of this country, the great and growing population, though a
very important consideration, will lose much of its weight if not combined with
other circumstances. The commerce of your Colonies is out of all proportion
beyond the numbers of the people. This ground of their commerce indeed has been
trod some days ago, and with great ability, by a distinguished person at your
bar. This gentleman, after thirty-five years--it is so long since he first
appeared at the same place to plead for the commerce of Great Britain--has come
again before you to plead the same cause, without any other effect of time, than
that to the fire of imagination and extent of erudition which even then marked
him as one of the first literary characters of his age, he has added a
consummate knowledge in the commercial interest of his country, formed by a long
course of enlightened and discriminating experience.
Sir, I should be inexcusable in coming after such a person with any detail, if a
great part of the members who now fill the House had not the misfortune to be
absent when he appeared at your bar. Besides, Sir, I propose to take the matter
at periods of time somewhat different from his. There is, if I mistake not, a
point of view from whence, if you will look at the subject, it is impossible
that it should not make an impression upon you.
I have in my hand two accounts; one a comparative state of the export trade of
England to its Colonies, as it stood in the year 1704, and as it stood in the
year 1772; the other a state of the export trade of this country to its Colonies
alone, as it stood in 1772, compared with the whole trade of England to all
parts of the world (the Colonies included) in the year 1704. They are from good
vouchers; the latter period from the accounts on your table, the earlier from an
original manuscript of Davenant, who first established the Inspector-General's
office, which has been ever since his time so abundant a source of Parliamentary
information.
The export trade to the Colonies consists of three great branches: the African--
which, terminating almost wholly in the Colonies, must be put to the account of
their commerce,--the West Indian, and the North American. All these are so
interwoven that the attempt to separate them would tear to pieces the contexture
of the whole; and, if not entirely destroy, would very much depreciate the value
of all the parts. I therefore consider these three denominations to be, what in
effect they are, one trade. [Footnote: 15]
The trade to the Colonies, taken on the export side, at the beginning of this
century, that is, in the year 1704, stood thus:--
Exports to North America and the West Indies. L483,265
To Africa. .................................. 86,665
--------
L569,930
In the year 1772, which I take as a middle year between the highest and lowest
of those lately laid on your table, the account was as follows:--
To North America and the West Indies ...... L4,791,734
To Africa. ................................ 866,398
To which, if you add the export trade from
Scotland, which had in 1704 no existence .. 364,000
----------
L6,022,132
From five hundred and odd thousand, it has grown to six millions. It has
increased no less than twelve-fold. This is the state of the Colony trade as
compared with itself at these two periods within this century;--and this is
matter for meditation. But this is not all. Examine my second account. See how
the export trade to the Colonies alone in 1772 stood in the other point of view;
that is, as compared to the whole trade of England in 1704:--
The whole export trade of England, including
that to the Colonies, in 1704. ................ L6,509,000
Export to the Colonies alone, in 1772 ......... 6,024,000
----------
Difference, L485,000
The trade with America alone is now within less than L500,000 of being equal to
what this great commercial nation, England, carried on at the beginning of this
century with the whole world! If I had taken the largest year of those on your
table, it would rather have exceeded. But, it will be said, is not this American
trade an unnatural protuberance, that has drawn the juices from the rest of the
body? The reverse. It is the very food that has nourished every other part into
its present magnitude. Our general trade has been greatly augmented, and
augmented more or less in almost every part to which it ever extended; but with
this material difference, that of the six millions which in the beginning of the
century constituted the whole mass of our export commerce, the Colony trade was
but one-twelfth part, it is now (as a part of sixteen millions) considerably
more than a third of the whole. This is the relative proportion of the
importance of the Colonies at these two periods, and all reasoning concerning
our mode of treating them must have this proportion as its basis, or it is a
reasoning weak, rotten, and sophistical.
Mr. Speaker, I cannot prevail on myself to hurry over this great consideration.
[Footnote: 15] IT IS GOOD FOR US TO BE HERE. [Footnote: 16] We stand where we
have an immense view of what is, and what is past. Clouds, indeed, and darkness,
rest upon the future. Let us, however, before we descend from this noble
eminence, reflect that this growth of our national prosperity has happened
within the short period of the life of man. It has happened within sixty-eight
years. There are those alive whose memory might touch the two extremities. For
instance, my Lord Bathurst might remember all the stages of the progress. He was
in 1704 of an age at least to be made to comprehend such things. He was then old
enough acta parentum jam legere, et quae sit potuit cognoscere virtus.
[Footnote: 17] Suppose, Sir, that the angel of this auspicious youth, foreseeing
the many virtues which made him one of the most amiable, as he is one of the
most fortunate, men of his age, had opened to him in vision that when in the
fourth generation the third Prince of the House of Brunswick had sat twelve
years on the throne of that nation which, by the happy issue of moderate and
healing counsels, was to be made Great Britain, he should see his son, Lord
Chancellor of England, turn back the current of hereditary dignity to its
fountain, and raise him to a higher rank of peerage, whilst he enriched the
family with a new one--if, amidst these bright and happy scenes of domestic
honor and prosperity, that angel should have drawn up the curtain, and unfolded
the rising glories of his country, and, whilst he was gazing with admiration on
the then commercial grandeur of England, the genius should point out to him a
little speck, scarcely visible in the mass of the national interest, a small
seminal principle, rather than a formed body, and should tell him: "Young man,
there is America--which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you
with stories of savage men, and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of
death, [Footnote: 18] show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now
attracts the envy of the world. Whatever England has been growing to by a
progressive increase of improvement, brought in by varieties of people, by
succession of civilizing conquests and civilizing settlements in a series of
seventeen hundred years, you shall see as much added to her by America in the
course of a single life!" If this state of his country had been foretold to him,
would it not require all the sanguine credulity of youth, and all the fervid
glow of enthusiasm, to make him believe it? Fortunate man, he has lived to see
it! Fortunate, indeed, if he lives to see nothing that shall vary the prospect,
and cloud the setting of his day!
Excuse me, Sir, if turning from such thoughts I resume this comparative view
once more. You have seen it on a large scale; look at it on a small one. I will
point out to your attention a particular instance of it in the single province
of Pennsylvania. In the year 1704 that province called for L11,459 in value of
your commodities, native and foreign. This was the whole. What did it demand in
1772? Why, nearly fifty times as much; for in that year the export to
Pennsylvania was L507,909, nearly equal to the export to all the Colonies
together in the first period.
I choose, Sir, to enter into these minute and particular details, because
generalities, which in all other cases are apt to heighten and raise the
subject, have here a tendency to sink it. When we speak of the commerce with our
Colonies, fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagination
cold and barren.
So far, Sir, as to the importance of the object, in view of its commerce, as
concerned in the exports from England. If I were to detail the imports, I could
show how many enjoyments they procure which deceive the burthen of life; how
many materials which invigorate the springs of national industry, and extend and
animate every part of our foreign and domestic commerce. This would be a curious
subject indeed; but I must prescribe bounds to myself in a matter so vast and
various.
I pass, therefore, to the Colonies in another point of view, their agriculture.
This they have prosecuted with such a spirit, that, besides feeding plentifully
their own growing multitude, their annual export of grain, comprehending rice,
has some years ago exceeded a million in value. Of their last harvest I am
persuaded they will export much more. At the beginning of the century some of
these Colonies imported corn from the Mother Country. For some time past the Old
World has been fed from the New. The scarcity which you have felt would have
been a desolating famine, if this child of your old age, with a true filial
piety, with a Roman charity, [Footnote: 19] had not put the full breast of its
youthful exuberance to the mouth of its exhausted parent.
As to the wealth which the Colonies have drawn from the sea by their fisheries,
you had all that matter fully opened at your bar. You surely thought those
acquisitions of value, for they seemed even to excite your envy; and yet the
spirit by which that enterprising employment has been exercised ought rather, in
my opinion, to have raised your esteem and admiration. And pray, Sir, what in
the world is equal to it? Pass by the other parts, and look at the manner in
which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale fishery.
Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them
penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's
Straits, whilst we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that
they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the
antipodes, and engaged under the frozen Serpent of the south. Falkland Island,
which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national
ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious
industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the
accumulated winter of both the poles. We know that whilst some of them draw the
line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude and
pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed
by their fisheries; no climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the
perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm
sagacity of English enterprise ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy
industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people; a
people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into
the bone of manhood. When I contemplate these things; when I know that the
Colonies in general owe little or nothing to any care of ours, and that they are
not squeezed into this happy form by the constraints of watchful and suspicious
government, but that, through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has
been suffered to take her own way to perfection; when I reflect upon these
effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of
power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die
away within me. My rigor relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.
I am sensible, Sir, that all which I have asserted in my detail is admitted in
the gross; but that quite a different conclusion is drawn from it. America,
gentlemen say, is a noble object. It is an object well worth fighting for.
Certainly it is, if fighting a people be the best way of gaining them. Gentlemen
in this respect will be led to their choice of means by their complexions
[Footnote: 20] and their habits. Those who understand the military art will of
course have some predilection for it. Those who wield the thunder of the state
[Footnote: 21] may have more confidence in the efficacy of arms. But I confess,
possibly for want of this knowledge, my opinion is much more in favor of prudent
management than of force; considering force not as an odious, but a feeble
instrument for preserving a people so numerous, so active, so growing, so
spirited as this, in a profitable and subordinate connection with us.
First, Sir, permit me to observe that the use of force alone is but temporary.
It may subdue for a moment, but it does not remove the necessity of subduing
again; and a nation is not governed [Footnote: 22] which is perpetually to be
conquered.
My next objection is its uncertainty. Terror is not always the effect of force,
and an armament is not a victory. If you do not succeed, you are without
resource; for, conciliation failing, force remains; but, force failing, no
further hope of reconciliation is left. Power and authority are sometimes bought
by kindness; but they can never be begged as alms by an impoverished and
defeated violence.
A further objection to force is, that you impair the object by your very
endeavors to preserve it. The thing you fought for is not the thing which you
recover; but depreciated, sunk, wasted, and consumed in the contest. Nothing
less will content me than WHOLE AMERICA. I do not choose to consume its strength
along with our own, because in all parts it is the British strength that I
consume. I do not choose to be caught by a foreign enemy at the end of this
exhausting conflict; and still less in the midst of it. I may escape; but I can
make no insurance against such an event. Let me add, that I do not choose wholly
to break the American spirit; because it is the spirit that has made the
country.
Lastly, we have no sort of experience in favor of force as an instrument in the
rule of our Colonies. Their growth and their utility has been owing to methods
altogether different. Our ancient indulgence [Footnote: 23] has been said to be
pursued to a fault. It may be so. But we know if feeling is evidence, that our
fault was more tolerable than our attempt to mend it; and our sin far more
salutary than our penitence.
These, Sir, are my reasons for not entertaining that high opinion of untried
force by which many gentlemen, for whose sentiments in other particulars I have
great respect, seem to be so greatly captivated. But there is still behind a
third consideration concerning this object which serves to determine my opinion
on the sort of policy which ought to be pursued in the management of America,
even more than its population and its commerce--I mean its temper and character.
In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating
feature which marks and distinguishes the whole; and as an ardent is always a
jealous affection, your Colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable
whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from
them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This
fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in
any other people of the earth, and this from a great variety of powerful causes;
which, to understand the true temper of their minds and the direction which this
spirit takes, it will not be amiss to lay open somewhat more largely.
First, the people of the Colonies are descendants of Englishmen. England, Sir,
is a nation which still, I hope, respects, and formerly adored, her freedom. The
Colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was most
predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from
your hands. They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty
according to English ideas, and on English principles. Abstract liberty, like
other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible
object; and every nation has formed to itself some favorite point, which by way
of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness. It happened, you know,
Sir, that the great contests [Footnote: 24] for freedom in this country were
from the earliest times chiefly upon the question of taxing. Most of the
contests in the ancient commonwealths turned primarily on the right of election
of magistrates; or on the balance among the several orders of the state. The
question of money was not with them so immediate. But in England it was
otherwise. On this point of taxes the ablest pens, and most eloquent tongues,
have been exercised; the greatest spirits have acted and suffered. In order to
give the fullest satisfaction concerning the importance of this point, it was
not only necessary for those who in argument defended the excellence of the
English Constitution to insist on this privilege of granting money as a dry
point of fact, and to prove that the right had been acknowledged in ancient
parchments and blind usages to reside in a certain body called a House of
Commons. They went much farther; they attempted to prove, and they succeeded,
that in theory it ought to be so, from the particular nature of a House of
Commons as an immediate representative of the people, whether the old records
had delivered this oracle or not. They took infinite pains to inculcate, as a
fundamental principle, that in all monarchies the people must in effect
themselves, mediately or immediately, possess the power of granting their own
money, or no shadow of liberty can subsist. The Colonies draw from you, as with
their life-blood, these ideas and principles. Their love of liberty, as with
you, fixed and attached on this specific point of taxing. Liberty might be safe,
or might be endangered, in twenty other particulars, without their being much
pleased or alarmed. Here they felt its pulse; and as they found that beat, they
thought themselves sick or sound. I do not say whether they were right or wrong
in applying your general arguments to their own case. It is not easy, indeed, to
make a monopoly of theorems and corollaries. The fact is, that they did thus
apply those general arguments; and your mode of governing them, whether through
lenity or indolence, through wisdom or mistake, confirmed them in the
imagination that they, as well as you, had an interest in these common
principles.
They were further confirmed in this pleasing error by the form of their
provincial legislative assemblies. Their governments are popular in an high
degree; some are merely popular; in all, the popular representative is the most
weighty; and this share of the people in their ordinary government never fails
to inspire them with lofty sentiments, and with a strong aversion from whatever
tends to deprive them of their chief importance.
If anything were wanting to this necessary operation of the form of government,
religion would have given it a complete effect. Religion, always a principle of
energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of
professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are
Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit
submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favorable to
liberty, but built upon it. I do not think, Sir, that the reason of this
averseness in the dissenting churches from all that looks like absolute
government is so much to be sought in their religious tenets, as in their
history. Every one knows that the Roman Catholic religion is at least co-eval
with most of the governments where it prevails; that it has generally gone hand
in hand with them, and received great favor and every kind of support from
authority. The Church of England too was formed from her cradle under the
nursing care of regular government. But the dissenting interests have sprung up
in direct opposition to all the ordinary powers of the world, and could justify
that opposition only on a strong claim to natural liberty. Their very existence
depended on the powerful and unremitted assertion of that claim. All
Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the
religion most prevalent in our Northern Colonies is a refinement on the
principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism
of the Protestant religion. This religion, under a variety of denominations
agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty, is
predominant in most of the Northern Provinces, where the Church of England,
notwithstanding its legal rights, is in reality no more than a sort of private
sect, not composing most probably the tenth of the people. The Colonists left
England when this spirit was high, and in the emigrants was the highest of all;
and even that stream of foreigners which has been constantly flowing into these
Colonies has, for the greatest part, been composed of dissenters from the
establishments of their several countries, who have brought with them a temper
and character far from alien to that of the people with whom they mixed.
Sir, I can perceive by their manner that some gentlemen object to the latitude
of this description, because in the Southern Colonies the Church of England
forms a large body, and has a regular establishment. It is certainly true. There
is, however, a circumstance attending these Colonies which, in my opinion, fully
counterbalances this difference, and makes the spirit of liberty still more high
and haughty than in those to the northward. It is that in Virginia and the
Carolinas they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case in any
part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of
their freedom. Freedom is to them [Footnote: 25] not only an enjoyment, but a
kind of rank and privilege. Not seeing there, that freedom, as in countries
where it is a common blessing and as broad and general as the air, may be united
with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude;
liberty looks, amongst them, like something that is more noble and liberal. I do
not mean, Sir, to commend the superior morality of this sentiment, which has at
least as much pride as virtue in it; but I cannot alter the nature of man. The
fact is so; and these people of the Southern Colonies are much more strongly,
and with an higher and more stubborn spirit, attached to liberty than those to
the northward. Such were all the ancient commonwealths; such were our Gothic
ancestors; such in our days were the Poles; and such will be all masters of
slaves, who are not slaves themselves. In such a people the haughtiness of
domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it
invincible.
Permit me, Sir, to add another circumstance in our Colonies which contributes no
mean part towards the growth and effect of this untractable spirit. I mean their
education. In no country perhaps in the world is the law so general a study. The
profession itself is numerous and powerful; and in most provinces it takes the
lead. The greater number of the deputies sent to the Congress were lawyers. But
all who read, and most do read, endeavor to obtain some smattering in that
science. I have been told by an eminent bookseller, that in no branch of his
business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many books as those on the
law exported to the Plantations. The Colonists have now fallen into the way of
printing them for their own use. I hear that they have sold nearly as many of
Blackstone's Commentaries in America as in England. General Gage marks out this
disposition very particularly in a letter on your table. He states that all the
people in his government are lawyers, or smatterers in law; and that in Boston
they have been enabled, by successful chicane, wholly to evade many parts of one
of your capital penal constitutions. The smartness of debate will say that this
knowledge ought to teach them more clearly the rights of legislature, their
obligations to obedience, and the penalties of rebellion. All this is mighty
well. But my honorable and learned friend on the floor, who condescends to mark
what I say for animadversion, will disdain that ground. He has heard, as well as
I, that when great honors and great emoluments do not win over this knowledge to
the service of the state, it is a formidable adversary to government. If the
spirit be not tamed and broken by these happy methods, it is stubborn and
litigious. Abeunt studia in mores. [Footnote: 26] This study readers men acute,
inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources.
In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge
of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they
anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness
of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance, and snuff the approach
of tyranny in every tainted breeze.
The last cause of this disobedient spirit in the Colonies is hardly less
powerful than the rest, as it is not merely moral, but laid deep in the natural
constitution of things. Three thousand miles of ocean lie between you and them.
No contrivance can prevent the effect of this distance in weakening government.
Seas roll, and months pass, between the order and the execution, and the want of
a speedy explanation of a single point is enough to defeat a whole system. You
have, indeed, winged ministers of vengeance, [Footnote: 27] who carry your bolts
in their pounces to the remotest verge of the sea. But there a power steps in
that limits the arrogance of raging passions and furious elements, and says, SO
FAR SHALL THOU GO, AND NO FARTHER. Who are you, that you should fret and rage,
and bite the chains of nature? Nothing worse happens to you than does to all
nations who have extensive empire; and it happens in all the forms into which
empire can be thrown. In large bodies the circulation [Footnote: 28] of power
must be less vigorous at the extremities. Nature has said it. The Turk cannot
govern Egypt and Arabia and Kurdistan as he governs Thrace; nor has he the same
dominion in Crimea and Algiers which he has at Brusa and Smyrna. Despotism
itself is obliged to truck and huckster. The Sultan gets such obedience as he
can. He governs with a loose rein, that he may govern at all; and the whole of
the force and vigor of his authority in his centre is derived from a prudent
relaxation in all his borders. Spain, in her provinces, is, perhaps, not so well
obeyed as you are in yours. She complies, too; she submits; she watches times.
This is the immutable condition, the eternal law of extensive and detached
empire.
Then, Sir, from these six capital sources--of descent, of form of government, of
religion in the Northern Provinces, of manners in the Southern, of education, of
the remoteness of situation from the first mover of government--from all these
causes a fierce spirit of liberty has grown up. It has grown with the growth of
the people in your Colonies, and increased with the increase of their wealth; a
spirit that unhappily meeting with an exercise of power in England which,
however lawful, is not reconcilable to any ideas of liberty, much less with
theirs, has kindled this flame that is ready to consume us.
I do not mean to commend either the spirit in this excess, or the moral causes
which produce it. Perhaps a more smooth and accommodating spirit of freedom in
them would be more acceptable to us. Perhaps ideas of liberty might be desired
more reconcilable with an arbitrary and boundless authority. Perhaps we might
wish the Colonists to be persuaded that their liberty is more secure when held
in trust for them by us, as their guardians during a perpetual minority, than
with any part of it in their own hands. The question is, not whether their
spirit deserves praise or blame, but--what, in the name of God, shall we do with
it? You have before you the object, such as it is, with all its glories, with
all its imperfections [Footnote: 29] on its head. You see the magnitude, the
importance, the temper, the habits, the disorders. By all these considerations
we are strongly urged to determine something concerning it. We are called upon
to fix some rule and line for our future conduct which may give a little
stability to our politics, and prevent the return of such unhappy deliberations
as the present. Every such return will bring the matter before us in a still
more untractable form. For, what astonishing and incredible things have we not
seen already! What monsters have not been generated from this unnatural
contention! Whilst every principle of authority and resistance has been pushed,
upon both sides, as far as it would go, there is nothing so solid and certain,
either in reasoning or in practice, that has not been shaken. Until very lately
all authority in America seemed to be nothing but an emanation from yours. Even,
the popular part of the Colony Constitution derived all its activity and its
first vital movement from the pleasure of the Crown. We thought, Sir, that the
utmost which the discontented Colonies could do was to disturb authority; we
never dreamt they could of themselves supply it--knowing in general what an
operose business it is to establish a government absolutely new. But having, for
our purposes in this contention, resolved that none but an obedient Assembly
should sit, the humors of the people there, finding all passage through the
legal channel stopped, with great violence broke out another way. Some provinces
have tried their experiment, as we have tried ours; and theirs has succeeded.
They have formed a government sufficient for its purposes, without the bustle of
a revolution or the formality of an election. Evident necessity and tacit
consent have done the business in an instant. So well they have done it, that
Lord Dunmore--the account is among the fragments on your table--tells you that
the new institution is infinitely better obeyed than the ancient government ever
was in its most fortunate periods. Obedience is what makes government, and not
the names by which it is called; not the name of Governor, as formerly, or
Committee, as at present. This new government has originated directly from the
people, and was not transmitted through any of the ordinary artificial media of
a positive constitution. It was not a manufacture ready formed, and transmitted
to them in that condition from England. The evil arising from hence is this;
that the Colonists having once found the possibility of enjoying the advantages
of order in the midst of a struggle for liberty, such struggles will not
henceforward seem so terrible to the settled and sober part of mankind as they
had appeared before the trial. Pursuing the same plan [Footnote: 30] of
punishing by the denial of the exercise of government to still greater lengths,
we wholly abrogated the ancient government of Massachusetts. We were confident
that the first feeling if not the very prospect, of anarchy would instantly
enforce a complete submission. The experiment was tried. A new, strange,
unexpected face of things appeared. Anarchy is found tolerable. A vast province
has now subsisted, and subsisted in a considerable degree of health and vigor
for near a twelvemonth, without Governor, without public Council, without
judges, without executive magistrates. How long it will continue in this state,
or what may arise out of this unheard-of situation, how can the wisest of us
conjecture? Our late experience has taught us that many of those fundamental
principles, formerly believed infallible, are either not of the importance they
were imagined to be, or that we have not at all adverted to some other far more
important and far more powerful principles, which entirely overrule those we had
considered as omnipotent. I am much against any further experiments which tend
to put to the proof any more of these allowed opinions which contribute so much
to the public tranquillity. In effect we suffer as much at home by this
loosening of all ties, and this concussion of all established opinions as we do
abroad; for in order to prove that the Americans have no right to their
liberties, we are every day endeavoring to subvert the maxims which preserve the
whole spirit of our own. To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we
are obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself; and we never seem to gain
a paltry advantage over them in debate without attacking some of those
principles, or deriding some of those feelings, for which our ancestors have
shed their blood.
But, Sir, in wishing to put an end to pernicious experiments, I do not mean to
preclude the fullest inquiry. Far from it. Far from deciding on a sudden or
partial view, [Footnote: 31] I would patiently go round and round the subject,
and survey it minutely in every possible aspect. Sir, if I were capable of
engaging you to an equal attention, I would state that, as far as I am capable
of discerning, there are but three ways [Footnote: 32] of proceeding relative to
this stubborn spirit which prevails in your Colonies, and disturbs your
government. These are--to change that spirit, as inconvenient, by removing the
causes; to prosecute it as criminal; or to comply with it as necessary. I would
not be guilty of an imperfect enumeration; I can think of but these three.
Another has indeed been started,--that of giving up the Colonies; but it met so
slight a reception that I do not think myself obliged to dwell a great while
upon it. It is nothing but a little sally of anger, like the forwardness of
peevish children who, when they cannot get all they would have, are resolved to
take nothing.
The first of these plans--to change the spirit, as inconvenient, by removing the
causes--I think is the most like a systematic proceeding. It is radical in its
principle; but it is attended with great difficulties, some of them little
short, as I conceive, of impossibilities. This will appear by examining into the
plans which have been proposed.
As the growing population in the Colonies is evidently one cause of their
resistance, it was last session mentioned in both Houses, by men of weight, and
received not without applause, that in order to check this evil it would be
proper for the Crown to make no further grants of land. But to this scheme there
are two objections. The first, that there is already so much unsettled land in
private hands as to afford room for an immense future population, although the
Crown not only withheld its grants, but annihilated its soil. If this be the
case, then the only effect of this avarice of desolation, this hoarding of a
royal wilderness, would be to raise the value of the possessions in the hands of
the great private monopolists without any adequate cheek to the growing and
alarming mischief of population.
But if you stopped your grants, what would be the consequence? The people would
occupy without grants. They have already so occupied in many places. You cannot
station garrisons in every part of these deserts. If you drive the people from
one place, they will carry on their annual tillage, and remove with their flocks
and herds to another. Many of the people in the back settlements are already
little attached to particular situations. Already they have topped the
Appalachian Mountains. From thence they behold before them an immense plain, one
vast, rich, level meadow; a square of five hundred miles. Over this they would
wander without a possibility of restraint; they would change their manners with
the habits of their life; would soon forget a government by which they were
disowned; would become hordes of English Tartars; and, pouring down upon your
unfortified frontiers a fierce and irresistible cavalry, become masters of your
governors and your counsellors, your collectors and comptrollers, and of all the
slaves that adhered to them. Such would, and in no long time must be, the effect
of attempting to forbid as a crime and to suppress as an evil the command and
blessing of providence, INCREASE AND MULTIPLY. Such would be the happy result of
the endeavor to keep as a lair of wild beasts that earth which God, by an
express charter, has given to the children of men. Far different, and surely
much wiser, has been our policy hitherto. Hitherto we have invited our people,
by every kind of bounty, to fixed establishments. We have invited the husbandman
to look to authority for his title. We have taught him piously to believe in the
mysterious virtue of wax and parchment. We have thrown each tract of land, as it
was peopled, into districts, that the ruling power should never be wholly out of
sight. We have settled all we could; and we have carefully attended every
settlement with government.
Adhering, Sir, as I do, to this policy, as well as for the reasons I have just
given, I think this new project of hedging-in population to be neither prudent
nor practicable.
To impoverish the Colonies in general, and in particular to arrest the noble
course of their marine enterprises, would be a more easy task. I freely confess
it. We have shown a disposition to a system of this kind, a disposition even to
continue the restraint after the offence, looking on ourselves as rivals to our
Colonies, and persuaded that of course we must gain all that they shall lose.
Much mischief we may certainly do. The power inadequate to all other things is
often more than sufficient for this. I do not look on the direct and immediate
power of the Colonies to resist our violence as very formidable. In this,
however, I may be mistaken. But when I consider that we have Colonies for no
purpose but to be serviceable to us, it seems to my poor understanding a little
preposterous to make them unserviceable in order to keep them obedient. It is,
in truth, nothing more than the old and, as I thought, exploded problem of
tyranny, which proposes to beggar its subjects into submission. But remember,
when you have completed your system of impoverishment, that nature still
proceeds in her ordinary course; that discontent will increase with misery; and
that there are critical moments in the fortune of all states when they who are
too weak to contribute to your prosperity may be strong enough to complete your
ruin. Spoliatis arma supersunt. [Footnote: 34]
The temper and character which prevail in our Colonies are, I am afraid,
unalterable by any human art. We cannot, I fear, falsify the pedigree of this
fierce people, and persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose
veins the blood of freedom circulates. The language in which they would hear you
tell them this tale would detect the imposition; your speech would betray you.
[Footnote: 35] An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another
Englishman into slavery.
I think it is nearly as little in our power to change their republican religion
as their free descent; or to substitute the Roman Catholic as a penalty, or the
Church of England as an improvement. The mode of inquisition and dragooning is
going out of fashion in the Old World, and I should not confide much to their
efficacy in the New. The education of the Americans is also on the same
unalterable bottom with their religion. You cannot persuade them to burn their
books of curious science; to banish their lawyers from their courts of laws; or
to quench the lights of their assemblies by refusing to choose those persons who
are best read in their privileges. It would be no less impracticable to think of
wholly annihilating the popular assemblies in which these lawyers sit. The army,
by which we must govern in their place, would be far more chargeable to us, not
quite so effectual, and perhaps in the end full as difficult to be kept in
obedience. With regard to the high aristocratic spirit of Virginia and the
Southern Colonies, it has been proposed, I know, to reduce it by declaring a
general enfranchisement of their slaves. This object has had its advocates and
panegyrists; yet I never could argue myself into any opinion of it. Slaves are
often much attached to their masters. A general wild offer of liberty would not
always be accepted. History furnishes few instances of it. It is sometimes as
hard to persuade slaves [Footnote: 36] to be free, as it is to compel freemen to
be slaves; and in this auspicious scheme we should have both these pleasing
tasks on our hands at once. But when we talk of enfranchisement, do we not
perceive that the American master may enfranchise too, and arm servile hands in
defence of freedom?--a measure to which other people have had recourse more than
once, and not without success, in a desperate situation of their affairs.
Slaves as these unfortunate black people are, and dull as all men are from
slavery, must they not a little suspect the offer of freedom from that very
nation which has sold them to their present masters?--from that nation, one of
whose causes of quarrel [Footnote: 37] with those masters is their refusal to
deal any more in that inhuman traffic? An offer of freedom from England would
come rather oddly, shipped to them in an African vessel which is refused an
entry into the ports of Virginia or Carolina with a cargo of three hundred
Angola negroes. It would be curious to see the Guinea captain attempting at the
same instant to publish his proclamation of liberty, and to advertise his sale
of slaves.
But let us suppose all these moral difficulties got over. The ocean remains. You
cannot pump this dry; and as long as it continues in its present bed, so long
all the causes which weaken authority by distance will continue.
"Ye gods, annihilate but space and time,
And make two lovers happy!"
was a pious and passionate prayer; but just as reasonable as many of the serious
wishes of grave and solemn politicians.
If then, Sir, it seems almost desperate to think of any alterative course for
changing the moral causes, and not quite easy to remove the natural, which
produce prejudices irreconcilable to the late exercise of our authority--but
that the spirit infallibly will continue, and, continuing, will produce such
effects as now embarrass us--the second mode under consideration is to prosecute
that spirit in its overt acts as criminal.
At this proposition I must pause a moment. The thing seems a great deal too big
for my ideas of jurisprudence. It should seem to my way of conceiving such
matters that there is a very wide difference, in reason and policy, between the
mode of proceeding on the irregular conduct of scattered individuals, or even of
bands of men who disturb order within the state, and the civil dissensions which
may, from time to time, on great questions, agitate the several communities
which compose a great empire. It looks to me to be narrow and pedantic to apply
the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest. I do not
know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people. I cannot
insult and ridicule the feelings of millions of my fellow-creatures as Sir
Edward Coke insulted one excellent individual (Sir Walter Raleigh) at the bar. I
hope I am not ripe to pass sentence on the gravest public bodies, intrusted with
magistracies of great authority and dignity, and charged with the safety of
their fellow-citizens, upon the very same title that I am. I really think that,
for wise men, this is not judicious; for sober men, not decent; for minds
tinctured with humanity, not mild and merciful.
Perhaps, Sir, I am mistaken in my idea of an empire, as distinguished from a
single state or kingdom. But my idea of it is this; that an empire is the
aggregate of many states under one common head, whether this head be a monarch
or a presiding republic. It does, in such constitutions, frequently happen--and
nothing but the dismal, cold, dead uniformity of servitude can prevent its
happening--that the subordinate parts have many local privileges and immunities.
Between these privileges and the supreme common authority the line may be
extremely nice. Of course disputes, often, too, very bitter disputes, and much
ill blood, will arise. But though every privilege is an exemption, in the case,
from the ordinary exercise of the supreme authority, it is no denial of it. The
claim of a privilege seems rather, ex vi termini, [Footnote: 38] to imply a
superior power; for to talk of the privileges of a state or of a person who has
no superior is hardly any better than speaking nonsense. Now, in such
unfortunate quarrels among the component parts of a great political union of
communities, I can scarcely conceive anything more completely imprudent than for
the head of the empire to insist that, if any privilege is pleaded against his
will or his acts, his whole authority is denied; instantly to proclaim
rebellion, to beat to arms, and to put the offending provinces under the ban.
Will not this, Sir, very soon teach the provinces to make no distinctions on
their part? Will it not teach them that the government, against which a claim of
liberty is tantamount to high treason, is a government to which submission is
equivalent to slavery? It may not always be quite convenient to impress
dependent communities with such an idea.
We are, indeed, in all disputes with the Colonies, by the necessity of things,
the judge. It is true, Sir. But I confess that the character of judge in my own
cause is a thing that frightens me. Instead of filling me with pride, I am
exceedingly humbled by it. I cannot proceed with a stern, assured, judicial
confidence, until I find myself in something more like a judicial character. I
must have these hesitations as long as I am compelled to recollect that, in my
little reading upon such contests as these, the sense of mankind has at least as
often decided against the superior as the subordinate power. Sir, let me add,
too, that the opinion of my having some abstract right [Footnote: 39] in my
favor would not put me much at my ease in passing sentence, unless I could be
sure that there were no rights which, in their exercise under certain
circumstances, were not the most odious of all wrongs and the most vexatious of
all injustice. Sir, these considerations have great weight with me when I find
things so circumstanced, that I see the same party at once a civil litigant
against me in point of right and a culprit before me, while I sit as a criminal
judge on acts of his whose moral quality is to be decided upon the merits of
that very litigation. Men are every now and then put, by the complexity of human
affairs, into strange situations; but justice is the same, let the judge be in
what situation he will.
There is, Sir, also a circumstance which convinces me that this mode of criminal
proceeding is not, at least in the present stage of our contest, altogether
expedient; which is nothing less than the conduct of those very persons who have
seemed to adopt that mode by lately declaring a rebellion in Massachusetts Bay,
as they had formerly addressed to have traitors brought hither, under an Act of
Henry the Eighth, [Footnote: 40] for trial. For though rebellion is declared, it
is not proceeded against as such, nor have any steps been taken towards the
apprehension or conviction of any individual offender, either on our late or our
former Address; but modes of public coercion have been adopted, and such as have
much more resemblance to a sort of qualified hostility towards an independent
power than the punishment of rebellious subjects. All this seems rather
inconsistent; but it shows how difficult it is to apply these juridical ideas to
our present case.
In this situation, let us seriously and coolly ponder. What is it we have got by
all our menaces, which have been many and ferocious? What advantage have we
derived from the penal laws we have passed, and which, for the time, have been
severe and numerous? What advances have we made towards our object by the
sending of a force which, by land and sea, is no contemptible strength? Has the
disorder abated? Nothing less. When I see things in this situation after such
confident hopes, bold promises, and active exertions, I cannot, for my life,
avoid a suspicion that the plan itself is not correctly right. [Footnote: 41]
If, then, the removal of the causes of this spirit of American liberty be for
the greater part, or rather entirely, impracticable; if the ideas of criminal
process be inapplicable--or, if applicable, are in the highest degree
inexpedient; what way yet remains? No way is open but the third and last,--to
comply with the American spirit as necessary; or, if you please, to submit to it
as a necessary evil.
If we adopt this mode,--if we mean to conciliate and concede,--let us see of
what nature the concession ought to be. To ascertain the nature of our
concession, we must look at their complaint. The Colonies complain that they
have not the characteristic mark and seal of British freedom. They complain that
they are taxed in a Parliament in which they are not represented. If you mean to
satisfy them at all, you must satisfy them with regard to this complaint. If you
mean to please any people you must give them the boon which they ask; not what
you may think better for them, but of a kind totally different. Such an act may
be a wise regulation, but it is no concession; whereas our present theme is the
mode of giving satisfaction.
Sir, I think you must perceive that I am resolved this day to have nothing at
all to do with the question of the right of taxation. Some gentlemen start--but
it is true; I put it totally out of the question. It is less than nothing in my
consideration. I do not indeed wonder, nor will you, Sir, that gentlemen of
profound learning are fond of displaying it on this profound subject. But my
consideration is narrow, confined, and wholly limited to the policy of the
question. I do not examine whether the giving away a man's money be a power
excepted and reserved out of the general trust of government, and how far all
mankind, in all forms of polity, are entitled to an exercise of that right by
the charter of nature; or whether, on the contrary, a right of taxation is
necessarily involved in the general principle of legislation, and inseparable
from the ordinary supreme power. These are deep questions, where great names
militate against each other, where reason is perplexed, and an appeal to
authorities only thickens the confusion; for high and reverend authorities lift
up their heads on both sides, and there is no sure footing in the middle. This
point is the great
"Serbonian bog,
Betwixt Damiata and Mount Casius old,
Where armies whole have sunk."
[Footnote: 42]
I do not intend to be overwhelmed in that bog, though in such respectable
company. The question [Footnote: 43] with me is, not whether you have a right to
render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them
happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I MAY do, but what humanity, reason, and
justice tell me I OUGHT to do. Is a politic act the worse for being a generous
one? Is no concession proper but that which is made from your want of right to
keep what you grant? Or does it lessen the grace or dignity of relaxing in the
exercise of an odious claim because you have your evidence-room full of titles,
and your magazines stuffed with arms to enforce them? What signify all those
titles, and all those arms? Of what avail are they, when the reason of the thing
tells me that the assertion of my title is the loss of my suit, and that I could
do nothing but wound myself by the use of my own weapons?
Such is steadfastly my opinion of the absolute necessity of keeping up the
concord of this Empire by an unity of spirit, though in a diversity of
operations, that, if I were sure the Colonists had, at their leaving this
country, sealed a regular compact of servitude; that they had solemnly abjured
all the rights of citizens; that they had made a vow to renounce all ideas of
liberty for them and their posterity to all generations; yet I should hold
myself obliged to conform to the temper I found universally prevalent in my own
day, and to govern two million of men, impatient of servitude, on the principles
of freedom. I am not determining a point of law, I am restoring tranquillity;
and the general character and situation of a people must determine what sort of
government is fitted for them. That point nothing else can or ought to
determine.
My idea, therefore, without considering whether we yield as matter of right, or
grant as matter of favor, is to admit the people of our Colonies into an
interest in the Constitution; and, by recording that admission in the journals
of Parliament, to give them as strong an assurance as the nature of the thing
will admit, that we mean forever to adhere to that solemn declaration of
systematic indulgence.
Some years ago the repeal of a revenue Act, upon its understood principle, might
have served to show that we intended an unconditional abatement of the exercise
of a taxing power. Such a measure was then sufficient to remove all suspicion,
and to give perfect content. But unfortunate events since that time may make
something further necessary; and not more necessary for the satisfaction of the
Colonies than for the dignity and consistency of our own future proceedings.
I have taken a very incorrect measure of the disposition of the House if this
proposal in itself would be received with dislike. I think, Sir, we have few
American financiers. But our misfortune is, we are too acute, we are too
exquisite [Footnote: 44] in our conjectures of the future, for men oppressed
with such great and present evils. The more moderate among the opposers of
Parliamentary concession freely confess that they hope no good from taxation,
but they apprehend the Colonists have further views; and if this point were
conceded, they would instantly attack the trade laws. [Footnote: 45] These
gentlemen are convinced that this was the intention from the beginning, and the
quarrel of the Americans with taxation was no more than a cloak and cover to
this design. Such has been the language even of a gentleman of real moderation,
and of a natural temper well adjusted to fair and equal government. I am,
however, Sir, not a little surprised at this kind of discourse, whenever I hear
it; and I am the more surprised on account of the arguments which I constantly
find in company with it, and which are often urged from the same mouths and on
the same day.
For instance, when we allege that it is against reason to tax a people under so
many restraints in trade as the Americans, the noble lord in the blue ribbon
shall tell you that the restraints on trade are futile and useless--of no
advantage to us, and of no burthen to those on whom they are imposed; that the
trade to America is not secured by the Acts of Navigation, but by the natural
and irresistible advantage of a commercial preference.
Such is the merit of the trade laws in this posture of the debate. But when
strong internal circumstances are urged against the taxes; when the scheme is
dissected; when experience and the nature of things are brought to prove, and do
prove, the utter impossibility of obtaining an effective revenue from the
Colonies; when these things are pressed, or rather press themselves, so as to
drive the advocates of Colony taxes to a clear admission of the futility of the
scheme; then, Sir, the sleeping trade laws revive from their trance, and this
useless taxation is to be kept sacred, not for its own sake, but as a
counterguard and security of the laws of trade.
Then, Sir, you keep up revenue laws which are mischievous, in order to preserve
trade laws that are useless. Such is the wisdom of our plan in both its members.
They are separately given up as of no value, and yet one is always to be
defended for the sake of the other; but I cannot agree with the noble lord, nor
with the pamphlet from whence he seems to have borrowed these ideas concerning
the inutility of the trade laws. For, without idolizing them, I am sure they are
still, in many ways, of great use to us; and in former times they have been of
the greatest. They do confine, and they do greatly narrow, the market for the
Americans; but my perfect conviction of this does not help me in the least to
discern how the revenue laws form any security whatsoever to the commercial
regulations, or that these commercial regulations are the true ground of the
quarrel, or that the giving way, in any one instance of authority, is to lose
all that may remain unconceded.
One fact is clear and indisputable. The public and avowed origin of this quarrel
was on taxation. This quarrel has indeed brought on new disputes on new
questions; but certainly the least bitter, and the fewest of all, on the trade
laws. To judge which of the two be the real radical cause of quarrel, we have to
see whether the commercial dispute did, in order of time, precede the dispute on
taxation? There is not a shadow of evidence for it. Next, to enable us to judge
whether at this moment a dislike to the trade laws be the real cause of quarrel,
it is absolutely necessary to put the taxes out of the question by a repeal. See
how the Americans act in this position, and then you will be able to discern
correctly what is the true object of the controversy, or whether any controversy
at all will remain. Unless you consent to remove this cause of difference, it is
impossible, with decency, to assert that the dispute is not upon what it is
avowed to be. And I would, Sir, recommend to your serious consideration whether
it be prudent to form a rule for punishing people, not on their own acts, but on
your conjectures? Surely it is preposterous at the very best. It is not
justifying your anger by their misconduct, but it is converting your ill-will
into their delinquency.
But the Colonies will go further. Alas! alas! when will this speculation against
fact and reason end? What will quiet these panic fears which we entertain of the
hostile effect of a conciliatory conduct? Is it true that no case can exist in
which it is proper for the sovereign to accede to the desires of his
discontented subjects? Is there anything peculiar in this case to make a rule
for itself? Is all authority of course lost when it is not pushed to the
extreme? Is it a certain maxim that the fewer causes of dissatisfaction are left
by government, the more the subject will be inclined to resist and rebel?
All these objections being in fact no more than suspicions, conjectures,
divinations, formed in defiance of fact and experience, they did not, Sir,
discourage me from entertaining the idea of a conciliatory concession founded on
the principles which I have just stated.
In forming a plan for this purpose, I endeavored to put myself in that frame of
mind which was the most natural and the most reasonable, and which was certainly
the most probable means of securing me from all error. I set out with a perfect
distrust of my own abilities, a total renunciation of every speculation of my
own, and with a profound reverence for the wisdom of our ancestors who have left
us the inheritance of so happy a constitution and so flourishing an empire, and,
what is a thousand times more valuable, the treasury of the maxims and
principles which formed the one and obtained the other.
During the reigns of the kings of Spain of the Austrian family, whenever they
were at a loss in the Spanish councils, it was common for their statesmen to say
that they ought to consult the genius of Philip the Second. The genius of Philip
the Second might mislead them, and the issue of their affairs showed that they
had not chosen the most perfect standard; but, Sir, I am sure that I shall not
be misled when, in a case of constitutional difficulty, I consult the genius of
the English Constitution. Consulting at that oracle--it was with all due
humility and piety--I found four capital examples in a similar case before me;
those of Ireland, Wales, Chester, and Durham.
Ireland, before the English conquest, [Footnote: 46] though never governed by a
despotic power, had no Parliament. How far the English Parliament itself was at
that time modelled according to the present form is disputed among antiquaries;
but we have all the reason in the world to be assured that a form of Parliament
such as England then enjoyed she instantly communicated to Ireland, and we are
equally sure that almost every successive improvement in constitutional liberty,
as fast as it was made here, was transmitted thither. The feudal baronage and
the feudal knighthood, the roots of our primitive Constitution, were early
transplanted into that soil, and grew and flourished there. Magna Charta, if it
did not give us originally the House of Commons, gave us at least a House of
Commons of weight and consequence. But your ancestors did not churlishly sit
down alone to the feast of Magna Charta. Ireland was made immediately a
partaker. This benefit of English laws and liberties, I confess, was not at
first extended to all Ireland. Mark the consequence. English authority and
English liberties had exactly the same boundaries. Your standard could never be
advanced an inch before your privileges. Sir John Davis shows beyond a doubt
that the refusal of a general communication of these rights was the true cause
why Ireland was five hundred years in subduing; and after the vain projects of a
military government, attempted in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, it was soon
discovered that nothing could make that country English, in civility and
allegiance, but your laws and your forms of legislature. It was not English
arms, but the English Constitution, that conquered Ireland. From that time
Ireland has ever had a general Parliament, as she had before a partial
Parliament. You changed the people; you altered the religion; but you never
touched the form or the vital substance of free government in that kingdom. You
deposed kings; [Footnote: 47] you restored them; you altered the succession to
theirs, as well as to your own Crown; but you never altered their Constitution,
the principle of which was respected by usurpation, restored with the
restoration of monarchy, and established, I trust, forever, by the glorious
Revolution. This has made Ireland the great and flourishing kingdom that it is,
and, from a disgrace and a burthen intolerable to this nation, has rendered her
a principal part of our strength and ornament. This country cannot be said to
have ever formally taxed her. The irregular things done in the confusion of
mighty troubles and on the hinge of great revolutions, even if all were done
that is said to have been done, form no example. If they have any effect in
argument, they make an exception to prove the rule. None of your own liberties
could stand a moment, if the casual deviations from them at such times were
suffered to be used as proofs of their nullity. By the lucrative amount of such
casual breaches in the Constitution, judge what the stated and fixed rule of
supply has been in that kingdom. Your Irish pensioners would starve, if they had
no other fund to live on than taxes granted by English authority. Turn your eyes
to those popular grants from whence all your great supplies are come, and learn
to respect that only source of public wealth in the British Empire.
My next example is Wales. This country was said to be reduced by Henry the
Third. It was said more truly to be so by Edward the First. But though then
conquered, it was not looked upon as any part of the realm of England. Its old
Constitution, whatever that might have been, was destroyed, and no good one was
substituted in its place. The care of that tract was put into the hands of Lords
Marchers [Footnote: 48]--a form of government of a very singular kind; a strange
heterogeneous monster, something between hostility and government; perhaps it
has a sort of resemblance, according to the modes of those terms, to that of
Commander-in-chief at present, to whom all civil power is granted as secondary.
The manners of the Welsh nation followed the genius of the government. The
people were ferocious, restive, savage, and uncultivated; sometimes composed,
never pacified. Wales, within itself, was in perpetual disorder, and it kept the
frontier of England in perpetual alarm. Benefits from it to the state there were
none. Wales was only known to England by incursion and invasion.
Sir, during that state of things, Parliament was not idle. They attempted to
subdue the fierce spirit of the Welsh by all sorts of rigorous laws. They
prohibited by statute the sending all sorts of arms into Wales, as you prohibit
by proclamation (with something more of doubt on the legality) the sending arms
to America. They disarmed the Welsh by statute, as you attempted (but still with
more question on the legality) to disarm New England by an instruction. They
made an Act to drag offenders from Wales into England for trial, as you have
done (but with more hardship) with regard to America. By another Act, where one
of the parties was an Englishman, they ordained that his trial should be always
by English. They made Acts to restrain trade, as you do; and they prevented the
Welsh from the use of fairs and markets, as you do the Americans from fisheries
and foreign ports. In short, when the Statute Book was not quite so much swelled
as it is now, you find no less than fifteen acts of penal regulation on the
subject of Wales.
Here we rub our hands.--A fine body of precedents for the authority of
Parliament and the use of it!--I admit it fully; and pray add likewise to these
precedents that all the while Wales rid this Kingdom like an incubus, that it
was an unprofitable and oppressive burthen, and that an Englishman travelling in
that country could not go six yards from the high road without being murdered.
The march of the human mind is slow. Sir, it was not until after two hundred
years discovered that, by an eternal law, providence had decreed vexation to
violence, and poverty to rapine. Your ancestors did however at length open their
eyes to the ill-husbandry of injustice. They found that the tyranny of a free
people could of all tyrannies the least be endured, and that laws made against a
whole nation were not the most effectual methods of securing its obedience.
Accordingly, in the twenty-seventh year of Henry the Eighth the course was
entirely altered. With a preamble stating the entire and perfect rights of the
Crown of England, it gave to the Welsh all the rights and privileges of English
subjects. A political order was established; the military power gave way to the
civil; the Marches were turned into Counties. But that a nation should have a
right to English liberties, and yet no share at all in the fundamental security
of these liberties--the grant of their own property--seemed a thing so
incongruous that, eight years after, that is, in the thirty-fifth of that reign,
a complete and not ill-proportioned representation by counties and boroughs was
bestowed upon Wales by Act of Parliament. From that moment, as by a charm, the
tumults subsided; obedience was restored; peace, order, and civilization
followed in the train of liberty. When the day-star of the English Constitution
had arisen in their hearts, all was harmony within and without--
"--simul alba nautis
Stella refulsit,
Defluit saxis agitatus humor;
Concidunt venti, fugiuntque nubes,
Et minax (quod sic voluere) ponto
Unda recumbit."
[Footnote: 49]
The very same year the County Palatine of Chester received the same relief from
its oppressions and the same remedy to its disorders. Before this time Chester
was little less distempered than Wales. The inhabitants, without rights
themselves, were the fittest to destroy the rights of others; and from thence
Richard the Second drew the standing army of archers with which for a time he
oppressed England. The people of Chester applied to Parliament in a petition
penned as I shall read to you:
"To the King, our Sovereign Lord, in most hunible wise
shewen unto your excellent Majesty the inhabitants of
your Grace's County Palatine of Chester: (1) That where
the said County Palatine of Chester is and hath been always
hitherto exempt, excluded, and separated out and
from your High Court of Parliament, to have any Knights
and Burgesses within the said Court; by reason whereof
the said inhabitants have hitherto sustained manifold
disherisons, losses, and damages, as well in their lands,
goods, and bodies, as in the good, civil, and politic governance
and maintenance of the commonwealth of their said
county; (2) And forasmuch as the said inhabitants have
always hitherto been bound by the Acts and Statutes
made and ordained by your said Highness and your most
noble progenitors, by authority of the said Court, as far
forth as other counties, cities, and boroughs have been,
that have had their Knights and Burgesses within your
said Court of Parliament, and yet have had neither Knight
ne Burgess there for the said County Palatine, the said
inhabitants, for lack thereof, have been oftentime touched
and grieved with Acts and Statutes made within the said
Court, as well derogatory unto the most ancient jurisdictions,
liberties, and privileges of your said County Palatine,
as prejudicial unto the commonwealth, quietness,
rest, and peace of your Grace's most bounden subjects
inhabiting within the same."
What did Parliament with this audacious address?--Reject it as a libel? Treat it
as an affront to Government? Spurn it as a derogation from the rights of
legislature? Did they toss it over the table? Did they burn it by the hands of
the common hangman?--They took the petition of grievance, all rugged as it was,
without softening or temperament, unpurged of the original bitterness and
indignation of complaint--they made it the very preamble to their Act of
redress, and consecrated its principle to all ages in the sanctuary of
legislation.
Here is my third example. It was attended with the success of the two former.
Chester, civilized as well as Wales, has demonstrated that freedom, and not
servitude, is the cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true
remedy for superstition. Sir, this pattern of Chester was followed in the reign
of Charles the Second with regard to the County Palatine of Durham, which is my
fourth example. This county had long lain out of the pale of free legislation.
So scrupulously was the example of Chester followed that the style of the
preamble is nearly the same with that of the Chester Act, and, without affecting
the abstract extent of the authority of Parliament, it recognizes the equity of
not suffering any considerable district in which the British subjects may act as
a body, to be taxed without their own voice in the grant.
Now if the doctrines of policy contained in these preambles, and the force of
these examples in the Acts of Parliaments, avail anything, what can be said
against applying them with regard to America? Are not the people of America as
much Englishmen as the Welsh? The preamble of the Act of Henry the Eighth says
the Welsh speak a language no way resembling that of his Majesty's English
subjects. Are the Americans not as numerous? If we may trust the learned and
accurate Judge Barrington's account of North Wales, and take that as a standard
to measure the rest, there is no comparison. The people cannot amount to above
200,000; not a tenth part of the number in the Colonies. Is America in
rebellion? Wales was hardly ever free from it. Have you at tempted to govern
America by penal statutes? You made fifteen for Wales. But your legislative
authority is perfect with regard to America. Was it less perfect in Wales,
Chester, and Durham? But America is virtually represented. What! does the
electric force of virtual representation more easily pass over the Atlantic than
pervade Wales,--which lies in your neighborhood--or than Chester and Durham,
surrounded by abundance of representation that is actual and palpable? But, Sir,
your ancestors thought this sort of virtual representation, however ample, to be
totally insufficient for the freedom of the inhabitants of territories that are
so near, and comparatively so inconsiderable. How then can I think it sufficient
for those which are infinitely greater, and infinitely more remote?
You will now, Sir, perhaps imagine that I am on the point of proposing to you a
scheme for a representation of the Colonies in Parliament. Perhaps I might be
inclined to entertain some such thought; but a great flood stops me in my
course. Opposuit natura. [Footnote: 50 ]--I cannot remove the eternal barriers
of the creation. The thing, in that mode, I do not know to be possible. As I
meddle with no theory,[Footnote: 51] I do not absolutely assert the
impracticability of such a representation; but I do not see my way to it, and
those who have been more confident have not been more successful. However, the
arm of public benevolence is not shortened, and there are often several means to
the same end. What nature has disjoined in one way, wisdom may unite in another.
When we cannot give the benefit as we would wish, let us not refuse it
altogether. If we cannot give the principal, let us find a substitute. But how?
Where? What substitute?
Fortunately I am not obliged, for the ways and means of this substitute, to tax
my own unproductive invention. I am not even obliged to go to the rich treasury
of the fertile framers of imaginary commonwealths--not to the Republic of Plato,
[Footnote: 52] not to the Utopia of More, [Footnote: 52] not to the Oceana of
Harrington. It is before me--it is at my feet,
"And the rude swain Treads daily on it with his clouted shoon."
[Footnote: 53]
I only wish you to recognize, for the theory, the ancient constitutional policy
of this kingdom with regard to representation, as that policy has been declared
in Acts of Parliament; and as to the practice, to return to that mode which a
uniform experience has marked out to you as best, and in which you walked with
security, advantage, and honor, until the year 1763. [Footnote: 54]
My Resolutions therefore mean to establish the equity and justice of a taxation
of America by GRANT, and not by IMPOSITION; to mark the LEGAL COMPETENCY
[Footnote: 55] of the Colony Assemblies for the support of their government in
peace, and for public aids in time of war; to acknowledge that this legal
competency has had a DUTIFUL AND BENEFICIAL EXERCISE; and that experience has
shown the BENEFIT OF THEIR GRANTS and the FUTILITY OF PARLIAMENTARY TAXATION as
a method of supply.
These solid truths compose six fundamental propositions. There are three more
Resolutions corollary to these. If you admit the first set, you can hardly
reject the others. But if you admit the first, I shall be far from solicitous
whether you accept or refuse the last. I think these six massive pillars will be
of strength sufficient to support the temple of British concord. I have no more
doubt than I entertain of my existence that, if you admitted these, you would
command an immediate peace, and, with but tolerable future management, a lasting
obedience in America. I am not arrogant in this confident assurance. The
propositions are all mere matters of fact, and if they are such facts as draw
irresistible conclusions even in the stating, this is the power of truth, and
not any management of mine.
Sir, I shall open the whole plan to you, together with such observations on the
motions as may tend to illustrate them where they may want explanation. The
first is a Resolution--
"That the Colonies and Plantations of Great Britain in North America, consisting
of fourteen separate Governments, and containing two millions and upwards of
free inhabitants, have not had the liberty and privilege of electing and sending
any Knights and Burgesses, or others, to represent them in the High Court of
Parliament."
This is a plain matter of fact, necessary to be laid down, and, excepting the
description, it is laid down in the language of the Constitution; it is taken
nearly verbatim from Acts of Parliament.
The second is like unto the first--
"That the said Colonies and Plantations have been liable to, and bounden by,
several subsidies, payments, rates, and taxes given and granted by Parliament,
though the said Colonies and Plantations have not their Knights and Burgesses in
the said High Court of Parliament, of their own election, to represent the
condition of their country; by lack whereof they have been oftentimes touched
and grieved by subsidies given, granted, and assented to, in the said Court, in
a manner prejudicial to the commonwealth, quietness, rest, and peace of the
subjects inhabiting within the same."
Is this description too hot, or too cold; too strong, or too weak? Does it
arrogate too much to the supreme legislature? Does it lean too much to the
claims of the people? If it runs into any of these errors, the fault is not
mine. It is the language of your own ancient Acts of Parliament.
"Non meus hic sermo, sed quae praecepit Ofellus,
Rusticus, abnormis sapiens."
[Footnote: 56]
It is the genuine produce of the ancient, rustic, manly, homebred sense of this
country.--I did not dare to rub off a particle of the venerable rust that rather
adorns and preserves, than destroys, the metal. It would be a profanation to
touch with a tool the stones which construct the sacred altar of peace. I would
not violate with modern polish the ingenuous and noble roughness of these truly
Constitutional materials. Above all things, I was resolved not to be guilty of
tampering, the odious vice of restless and unstable minds. I put my foot in the
tracks of our forefathers, where I can neither wander nor stumble. Determining
to fix articles of peace, I was resolved not to be wise beyond what was written;
I was resolved to use nothing else than the form of sound words, to let others
abound in their own sense, and carefully to abstain from all expressions of my
own. What the law has said, I say. In all things else I am silent. I have no
organ but for her words. This, if it be not ingenious, I am sure is safe.
[Footnote: 57]
There are indeed words expressive of grievance in this second Resolution, which
those who are resolved always to be in the right will deny to contain matter of
fact, as applied to the present case, although Parliament thought them true with
regard to the counties of Chester and Durham. They will deny that the Americans
were ever "touched and grieved" with the taxes. If they consider nothing in
taxes but their weight as pecuniary impositions, there might be some pretence
for this denial; but men may be sorely touched and deeply grieved in their
privileges, as well as in their purses. Men may lose little in property by the
act which takes away all their freedom. When a man is robbed of a trifle on the
highway, it is not the twopence lost that constitutes the capital outrage. This
is not confined to privileges. Even ancient indulgences, withdrawn without
offence on the part of those who enjoyed such favors, operate as grievances. But
were the Americans then not touched and grieved by the taxes, in some measure,
merely as taxes? If so, why were they almost all either wholly repealed, or
exceedingly reduced? Were they not touched and grieved even by the regulating
duties of the sixth of George the Second? Else, why were the duties first
reduced to one third in 1764, and afterwards to a third of that third in the
year 1766? Were they not touched and grieved by the Stamp Act? I shall say they
were, until that tax is revived. Were they not touched and grieved by the duties
of 1767, which were likewise repealed, and which Lord Hillsborough tells you,
for the Ministry, were laid contrary to the true principle of commerce? Is not
the assurance given by that noble person to the Colonies of a resolution to lay
no more taxes on them an admission that taxes would touch and grieve them? Is
not the Resolution of the noble lord in the blue ribbon, now standing on your
Journals, the strongest of all proofs that Parliamentary subsidies really
touched and grieved them? Else why all these changes, modifications, repeals,
assurances, and resolutions?
The next proposition is--
"That, from the distance of the said Colonies, and from other circumstances, no
method hath hitherto been devised for procuring a representation in Parliament
for the said Colonies"
This is an assertion of a fact, I go no further on the paper, though, in my
private judgment, a useful representation is impossible--I am sure it is not
desired by them, nor ought it perhaps by us--but I abstain from opinions
The fourth Resolution is--
"That each of the said Colonies hath within itself a body, chosen in part, or in
the whole, by the freemen, free-holders, or other free inhabitants thereof,
commonly called the General Assembly, or General Court, with powers legally to
raise, levy, and assess, according to the several usage of such Colonies duties
and taxes towards defraying all sorts of public services"
This competence in the Colony Assemblies is certain. It is proved by the whole
tenor of their Acts of Supply in all the Assemblies, in which the constant style
of granting is, "an aid to his Majesty", and Acts granting to the Crown have
regularly for near a century passed the public offices without dispute. Those
who have been pleased paradoxically to deny this right, holding that none but
the British Parliament can grant to the Crown, are wished to look to what is
done, not only in the Colonies, but in Ireland, in one uniform unbroken tenor
every session. Sir, I am surprised that this doctrine should come from some of
the law servants of the Crown. I say that if the Crown could be responsible, his
Majesty--but certainly the Ministers,--and even these law officers themselves
through whose hands the Acts passed, biennially in Ireland, or annually in the
Colonies--are in an habitual course of committing impeachable offences. What
habitual offenders have been all Presidents of the Council, all Secretaries of
State, all First Lords of Trade, all Attorneys and all Solicitors General!
However, they are safe, as no one impeaches them; and there is no ground of
charge against them except in their own unfounded theories.
The fifth Resolution is also a resolution of fact--
"That the said General Assemblies, General Courts, or other
bodies legally qualified as aforesaid, have at sundry times
freely granted several large subsidies and public aids for
his Majesty's service, according to their abilities, when
required thereto by letter from one of his Majesty's
principal Secretaries of State; and that their right to grant the
same, and their cheerfulness and sufficiency in the said
grants, have been at sundry times acknowledged by Parliament."
To say nothing of their great expenses in the Indian wars, and not to take their
exertion in foreign ones so high as the supplies in the year 1695--not to go
back to their public contributions in the year 1710--I shall begin to travel
only where the journals give me light, resolving to deal in nothing but fact,
authenticated by Parliamentary record, and to build myself wholly on that solid
basis.
On the 4th of April, 1748, a Committee of this House came to the following
resolution:
"Resolved: That it is the opinion of this Committee that it is
just and reasonable that the several Provinces and Colonies
of Massachusetts Bay, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and
Rhode Island, be reimbursed the expenses they have been
at in taking and securing to the Crown of Great Britain,
the Island of Cape Breton and its dependencies."
The expenses were immense for such Colonies. They were above L200,000 sterling;
money first raised and advanced on their public credit.
On the 28th of January, 1756, a message from the King came to us, to this
effect:
"His Majesty, being sensible of the zeal and vigor with which
his faithful subjects of certain Colonies in North America
have exerted themselves in defence of his Majesty's just
rights and possessions, recommends it to this House to
take the same into their consideration, and to enable his
Majesty to give them such assistance as may be a proper
reward and encouragement."
On the 3d of February, 1756, the House came to a suitable Resolution, expressed
in words nearly the same as those of the message, but with the further addition,
that the money then voted was as an encouragement to the Colonies to exert
themselves with vigor. It will not be necessary to go through all the
testimonies which your own records have given to the truth of my Resolutions. I
will only refer you to the places in the Journals:
Vol. xxvii.--16th and 19th May, 1757.
Vol. xxviii.--June 1st, 1758; April 26th and 30th, 1759;
March 26th and 31st, and April 28th, 1760;
Jan. 9th and 20th, 1761.
Vol. xxix.--Jan. 22d and 26th, 1762; March 14th and 17th,
1763.
Sir, here is the repeated acknowledgment of Parliament that the Colonies not
only gave, but gave to satiety. This nation has formally acknowledged two
things: first, that the Colonies had gone beyond their abilities, Parliament
having thought it necessary to reimburse them; secondly, that they had acted
legally and laudably in their grants of money, and their maintenance of troops,
since the compensation is expressly given as reward and encouragement. Reward is
not bestowed for acts that are unlawful; and encouragement is not held out to
things that deserve reprehension. My Resolution therefore does nothing more than
collect into one proposition what is scattered through your Journals. I give you
nothing but your own; and you cannot refuse in the gross what you have so often
acknowledged in detail. The admission of this, which will be so honorable to
them and to you, will, indeed, be mortal to all the miserable stories by which
the passions of the misguided people [Footnote: 58] have been engaged in an
unhappy system. The people heard, indeed, from the beginning of these disputes,
one thing continually dinned in their ears, that reason and justice demanded
that the Americans, who paid no taxes, should be compelled to contribute. How
did that fact of their paying nothing stand when the taxing system began? When
Mr. Grenville began to form his system of American revenue, he stated in this
House that the Colonies were then in debt two millions six hundred thousand
pounds sterling money, and was of opinion they would discharge that debt in four
years. On this state, those untaxed people were actually subject to the payment
of taxes to the amount of six hundred and fifty thousand a year. In fact,
however, Mr. Grenville was mistaken. The funds given for sinking the debt did
not prove quite so ample as both the Colonies and he expected. The calculation
was too sanguine; the reduction was not completed till some years after, and at
different times in different Colonies. However, the taxes after the war
continued too great to bear any addition, with prudence or propriety; and when
the burthens imposed in consequence of former requisitions were discharged, our
tone became too high to resort again to requisition. No Colony, since that time,
ever has had any requisition whatsoever made to it.
We see the sense of the Crown, and the sense of Parliament, on the productive
nature of a REVENUE BY GRANT. Now search the same Journals for the produce of
the REVENUE BY IMPOSITION. Where is it? Let us know the volume and the page.
What is the gross, what is the net produce? To what service is it applied? How
have you appropriated its surplus? What! Can none of the many skilful index-
makers that we are now employing find any trace of it?--Well, let them and that
rest together. But are the Journals, which say nothing of the revenue, as silent
on the discontent? Oh no! a child may find it. It is the melancholy burthen and
blot of every page.
I think, then, I am, from those Journals, justified in the sixth and last
Resolution, which is---
"That it hath been found by experience that the manner of granting the said
supplies and aids, by the said General Assemblies, hath been more agreeable to
the said Colonies, and more beneficial and conducive to the public service, than
the mode of giving and granting aids in Parliament, to be raised and paid in the
said Colonies."
This makes the whole of the fundamental part of the plan. The conclusion is
irresistible. You cannot say that you were driven by any necessity to an
exercise of the utmost rights of legislature. You cannot assert that you took on
yourselves the task of imposing Colony taxes from the want of another legal body
that is competent to the purpose of supplying the exigencies of the state
without wounding the prejudices of the people. Neither is it true that the body
so qualified, and having that competence, had neglected the duty.
The question now, on all this accumulated matter, is: whether you will choose to
abide by a profitable experience, or a mischievous theory; whether you choose to
build on imagination, or fact; whether you prefer enjoyment, or hope;
satisfaction in your subjects, or discontent?
If these propositions are accepted, everything which has been made to enforce a
contrary system must, I take it for granted, fall along with it. On that ground,
I have drawn the following Resolution, which, when it comes to be moved, will
naturally be divided in a proper manner:
"That it may be proper to repeal an Act [Footnote: 59] made in the seventh year
of the reign of his present Majesty, entitled, An Act for granting certain
duties in the British Colonies and Plantations in America; for allowing a
drawback of the duties of customs upon the exportation from this Kingdom of
coffee and cocoa-nuts of the produce of the said Colonies or Plantations; for
discontinuing the drawbacks payable on china earthenware exported to America;
and for more effectually preventing the clandestine running of goods in the said
Colonies and Plantations. And that it may be proper to repeal an Act [Footnote:
60] made in the fourteenth year of the reign of his present Majesty, entitled,
An Act to discontinue, in such manner and for such time as are therein
mentioned, the landing and discharging, lading or shipping of goods, wares, and
merchandise at the town and within the harbor of Boston, in the Province of
Massachusetts Bay, in North America. And that it may be proper to repeal an Act
made in the fourteenth year of the reign of his present Majesty, entitled, An
Act for the impartial administration of justice [Footnote: 61] in the cases of
persons questioned for any acts done by them in the execution of the law, or for
the suppression of riots and tumults, in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, in
New England. And that it may be proper to repeal an Act made in the fourteenth
year of the reign of his present Majesty, entitled, An Act for the better
regulating [Footnote: 62] of the Government of the Province of the Massachusetts
Bay, in New England. And also that it may be proper to explain and amend an Act
made in the thirty-fifth year of the reign of King Henry the Eighth, entitled,
An Act for the Trial of Treasons [Footnote: 63] committed out of the King's
Dominions."
I wish, Sir, to repeal the Boston Port Bill, because--independently of the
dangerous precedent of suspending the rights of the subject during the King's
pleasure--it was passed, as I apprehend, with less regularity and on more
partial principles than it ought. The corporation of Boston was not heard before
it was condemned. Other towns, full as guilty as she was, have not had their
ports blocked up. Even the Restraining Bill of the present session does not go
to the length of the Boston Port Act. The same ideas of prudence which induced
you not to extend equal punishment to equal guilt, even when you were punishing,
induced me, who mean not to chastise, but to reconcile, to be satisfied with the
punishment already partially inflicted.
Ideas of prudence and accommodation to circumstances prevent you from taking
away the charters of Connecticut and Rhode Island, as you have taken away that
of Massachusetts Bay, though the Crown has far less power in the two former
provinces than it enjoyed in the latter, and though the abuses have been full as
great, and as flagrant, in the exempted as in the punished. The same reasons of
prudence and accommodation have weight with me in restoring the charter of
Massachusetts Bay. Besides, Sir, the Act which changes the charter of
Massachusetts is in many particulars so exceptionable that if I did not wish
absolutely to repeal, I would by all means desire to alter it, as several of its
provisions tend to the subversion of all public and private justice. Such, among
others, is the power in the Governor to change the sheriff at his pleasure, and
to make a new returning officer for every special cause. It is shameful to
behold such a regulation standing among English laws.
The Act for bringing persons accused of committing murder, under the orders of
Government to England for trial, is but temporary. That Act has calculated the
probable duration of our quarrel with the Colonies, and is accommodated to that
supposed duration. I would hasten the happy moment of reconciliation, and
therefore must, on my principle, get rid of that most justly obnoxious Act.
The Act of Henry the Eighth, for the Trial of Treasons, I do not mean to take
away, but to confine it to its proper bounds and original intention; to make it
expressly for trial of treasons--and the greatest treasons may be committed--in
places where the jurisdiction of the Crown does not extend.
Having guarded the privileges of local legislature, I would next secure to the
Colonies a fair and unbiassed judicature, for which purpose, Sir, I propose the
following Resolution:
"That, from the time when the General Assembly or General Court of any Colony or
Plantation in North America shall have appointed by Act of Assembly, duly
confirmed, a settled salary to the offices of the Chief Justice and other Judges
of the Superior Court, it may be proper that the said Chief Justice and other
Judges of the Superior Courts of such Colony shall hold his and their office and
offices during their good behavior, and shall not be removed therefrom but when
the said removal shall be adjudged by his Majesty in Council, upon a hearing on
complaint from the General Assembly, or on a complaint from the Governor, or
Council, or the House of Representatives severally, or of the Colony in which
the said Chief Justice and other Judges have exercised the said offices"
The next Resolution relates to the Courts of Admiralty. It is this.
"That it may be proper to regulate the Courts of Admiralty or Vice Admiralty
authorized by the fifteenth Chapter of the Fourth of George the Third, in such a
manner as to make the same more commodious to those who sue, or are sued, in the
said Courts, and to provide for the more decent maintenance of the Judges in the
same."
These courts I do not wish to take away, they are in themselves proper
establishments. This court is one of the capital securities of the Act of
Navigation. The extent of its jurisdiction, indeed, has been increased, but this
is altogether as proper, and is indeed on many accounts more eligible, where new
powers were wanted, than a court absolutely new. But courts incommodiously
situated, in effect, deny justice, and a court partaking in the fruits of its
own condemnation is a robber. The Congress complain, and complain justly, of
this grievance.
These are the three consequential propositions I have thought of two or three
more, but they come rather too near detail, and to the province of executive
government, which I wish Parliament always to superintend, never to assume. If
the first six are granted, congruity will carry the latter three. If not, the
things that remain unrepealed will be, I hope, rather unseemly incumbrances on
the building, than very materially detrimental to its strength and stability.
Here, Sir, I should close, but I plainly perceive some objections remain which I
ought, if possible, to remove. The first will be that, in resorting to the
doctrine of our ancestors, as contained in the preamble to the Chester Act, I
prove too much, that the grievance from a want of representation, stated in that
preamble, goes to the whole of legislation as well as to taxation, and that the
Colonies, grounding themselves upon that doctrine, will apply it to all parts of
legislative authority.
To this objection, with all possible deference and humility, and wishing as
little as any man living to impair the smallest particle of our supreme
authority, I answer, that the words are the words of Parliament, and not mine,
and that all false and inconclusive inferences drawn from them are not mine, for
I heartily disclaim any such inference. I have chosen the words of an Act of
Parliament which Mr. Grenville, surely a tolerably zealous and very judicious
advocate for the sovereignty of Parliament, formerly moved to have read at your
table in confirmation of his tenets. It is true that Lord Chatham considered
these preambles as declaring strongly in favor of his opinions. He was a no less
powerful advocate for the privileges of the Americans. Ought I not from hence to
presume that these preambles are as favorable as possible to both, when properly
understood; favorable both to the rights of Parliament, and to the privilege of
the dependencies of this Crown? But, Sir, the object of grievance in my
Resolution I have not taken from the Chester, but from the Durham Act, which
confines the hardship of want of representation to the case of subsidies, and
which therefore falls in exactly with the case of the Colonies. But whether the
unrepresented counties were de jure or de facto [Footnote: 64] bound, the
preambles do not accurately distinguish, nor indeed was it necessary; for,
whether de jure or de facto, the Legislature thought the exercise of the power
of taxing as of right, or as of fact without right, equally a grievance, and
equally oppressive.
I do not know that the Colonies have, in any general way, or in any cool hour,
gone much beyond the demand of humanity in relation to taxes. It is not fair to
judge of the temper or dispositions of any man, or any set of men, when they are
composed and at rest, from their conduct or their expressions in a state of
disturbance and irritation. It is besides a very great mistake to imagine that
mankind follow up practically any speculative principle, either of government or
of freedom, as far as it will go in argument and logical illation. We Englishmen
stop very short of the principles upon which we support any given part of our
Constitution, or even the whole of it together. I could easily, if I had not
already tired you, give you very striking and convincing instances of it. This
is nothing but what is natural and proper. All government, indeed every human
benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on
compromise and barter. We balance inconveniences; we give and take; we remit
some rights, that we may enjoy others; and we choose rather to be happy citizens
than subtle disputants. As we must give away some natural liberty to enjoy civil
advantages, so we must sacrifice some civil liberties for the advantages to be
derived from the communion and fellowship of a great empire. But, in all fair
dealings, the thing bought must bear some proportion to the purchase paid. None
will barter away the immediate jewel of his soul. [Footnote: 65] Though a great
house is apt to make slaves haughty, yet it is purchasing a part of the
artificial importance of a great empire too dear to pay for it all essential
rights and all the intrinsic dignity of human nature. None of us who would not
risk his life rather than fall under a government purely arbitrary. But although
there are some amongst us who think our Constitution wants many improvements to
make it a complete system of liberty, perhaps none who are of that opinion would
think it right to aim at such improvement by disturbing his country, and risking
everything that is dear to him. In every arduous enterprise we consider what we
are to lose, as well as what we are to gain; and the more and better stake of
liberty every people possess, the less they will hazard in a vain attempt to
make it more. These are the cords of man. Man acts from adequate motives
relative to his interest, and not on metaphysical speculations. Aristotle, the
great master of reasoning, cautions us, and with great weight and propriety,
against this species of delusive geometrical accuracy in moral arguments as the
most fallacious of all sophistry.
The Americans will have no interest contrary to the grandeur and glory of
England, when they are not oppressed by the weight of it; and they will rather
be inclined to respect the acts of a superintending legislature when they see
them the acts of that power which is itself the security, not the rival, of
their secondary importance. In this assurance my mind most perfectly acquiesces,
and I confess I feel not the least alarm from the discontents which are to arise
from putting people at their ease, nor do I apprehend the destruction of this
Empire from giving, by an act of free grace and indulgence, to two millions of
my fellow-citizens some share of those rights upon which. I have always been
taught to value myself.
It is said, indeed, that this power of granting, vested in American Assemblies,
would dissolve the unity of the Empire, which was preserved entire, although
Wales, and Chester, and Durham were added to it. Truly, Mr. Speaker, I do not
know what this unity means, nor has it ever been heard of, that I know, in the
constitutional policy of this country. The very idea of subordination of parts
excludes this notion of simple and undivided unity. England is the head; but she
is not the head and the members too. Ireland has ever had from the beginning a
separate, but not an independent, legislature, which, far from distracting,
promoted the union of the whole. Everything was sweetly and harmoniously
disposed through both islands for the conservation of English dominion, and the
communication of English liberties. I do not see that the same principles might
not be carried into twenty islands and with the same good effect. This is my
model with regard to America, as far as the internal circumstances of the two
countries are the same. I know no other unity of this Empire than I can draw
from its example during these periods, when it seemed to my poor understanding
more united than it is now, or than it is likely to be by the present methods.
But since I speak of these methods, I recollect, Mr. Speaker, almost too late,
that I promised, before I finished, to say something of the proposition of the
noble lord on the floor, which has been so lately received and stands on your
Journals. I must be deeply concerned whenever it is my misfortune to continue a
difference with the majority of this House; but as the reasons for that
difference are my apology for thus troubling you, suffer me to state them in a
very few words. I shall compress them into as small a body as I possibly can,
having already debated that matter at large when the question was before the
Committee.
First, then, I cannot admit that proposition of a ransom [Footnote: 66] by
auction; because it is a mere project. It is a thing new, unheard of; supported
by no experience; justified by no analogy; without example of our ancestors, or
root in the Constitution. It is neither regular Parliamentary taxation, nor
Colony grant. Experimentum in corpore vili [Footnote: 67] is a good rule, which
will ever make me adverse to any trial of experiments on what is certainly the
most valuable of all subjects, the peace of this Empire.
Secondly, it is an experiment which must be fatal in the end to our
Constitution. For what is it but a scheme for taxing the Colonies in the ante-
chamber of the noble lord and his successors? To settle the quotas and
proportions in this House is clearly impossible. You, Sir, may flatter yourself
you shall sit a state auctioneer, with your hammer in your hand, and knock down
to each Colony as it bids. But to settle, on the plan laid down by the noble
lord, the true proportional payment for four or five and twenty governments
according to the absolute and the relative wealth of each, and according to the
British proportion of wealth and burthen, is a wild and chimerical notion. This
new taxation must therefore come in by the back door of the Constitution. Each
quota must be brought to this House ready formed; you can neither add nor alter.
You must register it. You can do nothing further, for on what grounds can you
deliberate either before or after the proposition? You cannot hear the counsel
for all these provinces, quarrelling each on its own quantity of payment, and
its proportion to others If you should attempt it, the Committee of Provincial
Ways and Means, or by whatever other name it will delight to be called, must
swallow up all the time of Parliament.
Thirdly, it does not give satisfaction to the complaint of the Colonies. They
complain that they are taxed without their consent, you answer, that you will
fix the sum at which they shall be taxed. That is, you give them the very
grievance for the remedy. You tell them, indeed, that you will leave the mode to
themselves. I really beg pardon--it gives me pain to mention it--but you must be
sensible that you will not perform this part of the compact. For, suppose the
Colonies were to lay the duties, which furnished their contingent, upon the
importation of your manufactures, you know you would never suffer such a tax to
be laid. You know, too, that you would not suffer many other modes of taxation,
so that, when you come to explain yourself, it will be found that you will
neither leave to themselves the quantum nor the mode, nor indeed anything. The
whole is delusion from one end to the other.
Fourthly, this method of ransom by auction, unless it be universally accepted,
will plunge you into great and inextricable difficulties. In what year of our
Lord are the proportions of payments to be settled? To say nothing of the
impossibility that Colony agents should have general powers of taxing the
Colonies at their discretion, consider, I implore you, that the communication by
special messages and orders between these agents and their constituents, on each
variation of the case, when the parties come to contend together and to dispute
on their relative proportions, will be a matter of delay, perplexity, and
confusion that never can have an end.
If all the Colonies do not appear at the outcry, what is the condition of those
assemblies who offer, by themselves or their agents, to tax themselves up to
your ideas of their proportion? The refractory Colonies who refuse all
composition will remain taxed only to your old impositions, which, however
grievous in principle, are trifling as to production. The obedient Colonies in
this scheme are heavily taxed, the refractory remain unburdened. What will you
do? Will you lay new and heavier taxes by Parliament on the disobedient? Pray
consider in what way you can do it. You are perfectly convinced that, in the way
of taxing, you can do nothing but at the ports. Now suppose it is Virginia that
refuses to appear at your auction, while Maryland and North Carolina bid
handsomely for their ransom, and are taxed to your quota, how will you put these
Colonies on a par? Will you tax the tobacco of Virginia? If you do, you give its
death-wound to your English revenue at home, and to one of the very greatest
articles of your own foreign trade. If you tax the import of that rebellious
Colony, what do you tax but your own manufactures, or the goods of some other
obedient and already well-taxed Colony? Who has said one word on this labyrinth
of detail, which bewilders you more and more as you enter into it? Who has
presented, who can present you with a clue to lead you out of it? I think, Sir,
it is impossible that you should not recollect that the Colony bounds are so
implicated in one another,--you know it by your other experiments in the bill
for prohibiting the New England fishery,--that you can lay no possible
restraints on almost any of them which may not be presently eluded, if you do
not confound the innocent with the guilty, and burthen those whom, upon every
principle, you ought to exonerate. He must be grossly ignorant of America who
thinks that, without falling into this confusion of all rules of equity and
policy, you can restrain any single Colony, especially Virginia and Maryland,
the central and most important of them all.
Let it also be considered that, either in the present confusion you settle a
permanent contingent, which will and must be trifling, and then you have no
effectual revenue; or you change the quota at every exigency, and then on every
new repartition you will have a new quarrel.
Reflect, besides, that when you have fixed a quota for every Colony, you have
not provided for prompt and punctual payment. Suppose one, two, five, ten years'
arrears. You cannot issue a Treasury Extent against the failing Colony. You must
make new Boston Port Bills, new restraining laws, new acts for dragging men to
England for trial. You must send out new fleets, new armies. All is to begin
again. From this day forward the Empire is never to know an hour's tranquillity.
An intestine fire will be kept alive in the bowels of the Colonies, which one
time or other must consume this whole Empire. I allow indeed that the empire of
Germany raises her revenue and her troops by quotas and contingents; but the
revenue of the empire, and the army of the empire, is the worst revenue and the
worst army in the world.
Instead of a standing revenue, you will therefore have a perpetual quarrel.
Indeed, the noble lord who proposed this project of a ransom by auction seems
himself to be of that opinion. His project was rather designed for breaking the
union of the Colonies than for establishing a revenue. He confessed he
apprehended that his proposal would not be to their taste. I say this scheme of
disunion seems to be at the bottom of the project; for I will not suspect that
the noble lord meant nothing but merely to delude the nation by an airy phantom
which he never intended to realize. But whatever his views may be, as I propose
the peace and union of the Colonies as the very foundation of my plan, it cannot
accord with one whose foundation is perpetual discord.
Compare the two. This I offer to give you is plain and simple. The other full of
perplexed and intricate mazes. This is mild; that harsh. This is found by
experience effectual for its purposes; the other is a new project. This is
universal; the other calculated for certain Colonies only. This is immediate in
its conciliatory operation; the other remote, contingent, full of hazard. Mine
is what becomes the dignity of a ruling people--gratuitous, unconditional, and
not held out as a matter of bargain and sale. I have done my duty in proposing
it to you. I have indeed tired you by a long discourse; but this is the
misfortune of those to whose influence nothing will be conceded, and who must
win every inch of their ground by argument. You have heard me with goodness. May
you decide with wisdom! For my part, I feel my mind greatly disburthened by what
I have done to-day. I have been the less fearful of trying your patience,
because on this subject I mean to spare it altogether in future. I have this
comfort, that in every stage of the American affairs I have steadily opposed the
measures that have produced the confusion, and may bring on the destruction, of
this Empire. I now go so far as to risk a proposal of my own. If I cannot give
peace to my country, I give it to my conscience.
But what, says the financier, is peace to us without money? Your plan gives us
no revenue. No! But it does; for it secures to the subject the power or refusal,
the first of all revenues. Experience is a cheat, and fact a liar, if this power
in the subject of proportioning his grant, or of not granting at all, has not
been found the richest mine of revenue ever discovered by the skill or by the
fortune of man. It does not indeed vote you L152,750 11s. 23/4d, nor any other
paltry limited sum; but it gives the strong box itself, the fund, the bank--from
whence only revenues can arise amongst a people sensible of freedom. Posita
luditur arca. [Footnote: 68] Cannot you, in England--cannot you, at this time of
day--cannot you, a House of Commons, trust to the principle which has raised so
mighty a revenue, and accumulated a debt of near 140,000,000 in this country? Is
this principle to be true in England, and false everywhere else? Is it not true
in Ireland? Has it not hitherto been true in the Colonies? Why should you
presume that, in any country, a body duly constituted for any function will
neglect to perform its duty and abdicate its trust? Such a presumption
[Footnote: 69] would go against all governments in all modes. But, in truth,
this dread of penury of supply from a free assembly has no foundation in nature;
for first, observe that, besides the desire which all men have naturally of
supporting the honor of their own government, that sense of dignity and that
security to property which ever attends freedom has a tendency to increase the
stock of the free community. Most may be taken where most is accumulated. And
what is the soil or climate where experience has not uniformly proved that the
voluntary flow of heaped-up plenty, bursting from the weight of its own rich
luxuriance, has ever run with a more copious stream of revenue than could be
squeezed from the dry husks of oppressed indigence by the straining of all the
politic machinery in the world? [Footnote: 70]
Next, we know that parties must ever exist in a free country. We know, too, that
the emulations of such parties--their contradictions, their reciprocal
necessities, their hopes, and their fears--must send them all in their turns to
him that holds the balance of the State. The parties are the gamesters; but
Government keeps the table, and is sure to be the winner in the end. When this
game is played, I really think it is more to be feared that the people will be
exhausted, than that Government will not be supplied; whereas, whatever is got
by acts of absolute power ill obeyed, because odious, or by contracts ill kept,
because constrained, will be narrow, feeble, uncertain, and precarious.
"Ease would retract Vows made in pain, as violent and void."
I, for one, protest against compounding our demands. I declare against
compounding, for a poor limited sum, the immense, ever-growing, eternal debt
which is due to generous government from protected freedom. And so may I speed
in the great object I propose to you, as I think it would not only be an act of
injustice, but would be the worst economy in the world, to compel the Colonies
to a sum certain, either in the way of ransom or in the way of compulsory
compact.
But to clear up my ideas on this subject: a revenue from America transmitted
hither--do not delude yourselves--you never can receive it; no, not a shilling.
We have experience that from remote countries it is not to be expected. If, when
you attempted to extract revenue from Bengal, you were obliged to return in loan
what you had taken in imposition, what can you expect from North America? For
certainly, if ever there was a country qualified to produce wealth, it is India;
or an institution fit for the transmission, it is the East India Company.
America has none of these aptitudes. If America gives you taxable objects on
which you lay your duties here, and gives you, at the same time, a surplus by a
foreign sale of her commodities to pay the duties on these objects which you tax
at home, she has performed her part to the British revenue. But with regard to
her own internal establishments, she may, I doubt not she will, contribute in
moderation. I say in moderation, for she ought not to be permitted to exhaust
herself. She ought to be reserved to a war, the weight of which, with the
enemies [Footnote: 71] that we are most likely to have, must be considerable in
her quarter of the globe. There she may serve you, and serve you essentially.
For that service--for all service, whether of revenue, trade, or empire--my
trust is in her interest in the British Constitution. My hold of the Colonies is
in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from
similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as
air, [Footnote: 72] are as strong as links of iron. Let the Colonists always
keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government,--they will
cling and grapple to you, [Footnote: 73] and no force under heaven will be of
power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood that
your government may be one thing, and their privileges another, that these two
things may exist without any mutual relation, the cement is gone [Footnote: 74]-
-the cohesion is loosened--and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As
long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as
the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith,
wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn
their faces towards you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have;
the more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience.
Slavery they can have anywhere--it is a weed that grows in every soil. They may
have it from Spain; they may have it from Prussia. But, until you become lost to
all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can
have from none but you. This is the commodity of price of which you have the
monopoly. This is the true Act of Navigation which binds to you the commerce of
the Colonies, and through them secures to you the wealth of the world. Deny them
this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond which originally
made, and must still preserve, the unity of the Empire. Do not entertain so weak
an imagination as that your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and your
sufferances, your cockets and your clearances, are what form the great
securities of your commerce. Do not dream that your letters of office, and your
instructions, and your suspending clauses, are the things that hold together the
great contexture of the mysterious whole. These things do not make your
government. Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of the
English communion that gives all their life and efficacy to them. It is the
spirit of the English Constitution which, infused through the mighty mass,
pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the Empire, even
down to the minutest member.
Is it not the same virtue which does everything for us here in England? Do you
imagine, then, that it is the Land Tax Act which raises your revenue? that it is
the annual vote in the Committee of Supply which gives you your army? or that it
is the Mutiny Bill which inspires it with bravery and discipline? No! surely no!
It is the love of the people; it is their attachment to their government, from
the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which
gives you your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience
without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten
timber.
All this, I know well enough, will sound wild and chimerical to the profane herd
[Footnote: 75] of those vulgar and mechanical politicians who have no place
among us; a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and
material, and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the
great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. But to men
truly initiated and rightly taught, these ruling and master principles which, in
the opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are
in truth everything, and all in all. Magnanimity [Footnote: 76] in politics is
not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill
together. If we are conscious of our station, and glow with zeal to fill our
places as becomes our situation and ourselves, we ought to auspicate [Footnote:
77] all our public proceedings on America with the old warning of the church,
Sursum corda! [Footnote: 78] We ought to elevate our minds to the greatness of
that trust to which the order of providence has called us. By adverting to the
dignity of this high calling our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into
a glorious empire, and have made the most extensive and the only honorable
conquests--not by destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the number, the
happiness, of the human race. Let us get an American revenue as we have got an
American empire. English privileges have made it all that it is; English
privileges alone will make it all it can be.
In full confidence of this unalterable truth, I now, quod felix faustumque sit,
[Footnote: 79] lay the first stone of the Temple of Peace; and I move you--
"That the Colonies and Plantations of Great Britain in North America, consisting
of fourteen separate governments, and containing two millions and upwards of
free inhabitants, have not had the liberty and privilege of electing and sending
any Knights and Burgesses, or others, to represent them in the High Court of
Parliament."
FOOTNOTES
[Footnote: 1. grand penal bill. This bill originated with Lord North. It
restricted the trade of the New England colonies to England and her
dependencies. It also placed serious limitations upon the Newfoundland
fisheries. The House of Lords was dissatisfied with the measure because it did
not include all the colonies.]
[Footnote: 2. When I first had the honor. Burke was first elected to Parliament
Dec. 26, 1765. He was at the time secretary to Lord Rockingham, Prime Minister.
Previous to this he had made himself thoroughly familiar with England's policy
in dealing with her dependencies--notably Ireland.]
[Footnote: 3. my original sentiments. After many demonstrations both in America
and England the Stamp Act became a law in 1765. One of the first tasks the
Rockingham ministry set itself was to bring about a repeal of this act. Burke
made his first speech in support of his party. He argued that the abstract and
theoretical rights claimed by England in matters of government should be set
aside when they were unfavorable to the happiness and prosperity of her colonies
and herself. His speech was complimented by Pitt, and Dr. Johnson wrote that no
new member had ever before attracted such attention.]
[Footnote: 4. America has been kept in agitation. For a period of nearly one
hundred years the affairs of the colonies had been intrusted to a standing
committee appointed by Parliament. This committee was called "The Lords of
Trade." From its members came many if not the majority of the propositions for
the regulation of the American trade. To them the colonial governors, who were
appointed by the king, gave full accounts of the proceedings of the colonial
legislatures. These reports, often colored by personal prejudice, did not always
represent the colonists in the best light. It was mainly through the influence
of one of the former Lords of Trade, Charles Townshend, who afterwards became
the leading voice in the Pitt ministry, that the Stamp Act was passed.]
[Footnote: 5. a worthy member. Mr. Rose Fuller.]
[Footnote: 6. former methods. Condense the thought in this paragraph. Are such
"methods" practised nowadays?]
[Footnote: 7. paper government. Burke possibly had in mind the constitution
prepared for the Carolinas by John Locke and Earl of Shaftesbury. The scheme was
utterly impracticable and gave cause for endless dissatisfaction.]
[Footnote: 8. Refined policy. After a careful reading of the paragraph determine
what Burke means by "refined policy."]
[Footnote: 9. the project. The bill referred to had been passed by the House on
Feb. 27. It provided that those colonies which voluntarily voted contributions
for the common defence and support of the English government, and in addition
made provision for the administration of their own civil affairs, should be
exempt from taxation, except such as was necessary for the regulation of trade.
It has been declared by some that the measure was meant m good faith and that
its recognition and acceptance by the colonies would have brought good results.
Burke, along with others of the opposition, argued that the intention of the
bill was to cause dissension and division among the colonies. Compare 7, 11-12.
State your opinion and give reasons.]
[Footnote: 10. the noble lord in the blue ribbon Lord North (1732-1792) He
entered Parliament at the age of twenty-two, served as Lord of the Treasury,
1759; was removed by Rockingham, 1765; was again appointed by Pitt to the office
of Joint Paymaster of the Forces, became Prime Minister, 1770, and resigned,
1781 Lord North is described both by his contemporaries and later histonaus as
an easy-going, indolent man, short-sighted and rather stupid, though obstinate
and courageous. He was the willing servant of George III, and believed in the
principle of authority as opposed to that of conciliation. The blue ribbon was
the badge of the Order of the Garter instituted by Edward III Lord North was
made a Knight of the Garter, 1772. Burke often mentions the "blue ribbon" in
speaking of the Prime Minister. Why?]
[Footnote: 11. Colony agents. It was customary for colonies to select some one
to represent them in important matters of legislation. Burke himself served as
the agent of New York. Do you think this tact accounts in any way for his
attitude in this speech?]
[Footnote: 12. our address Parliament had prepared an address to the king some
months previous, in which Massachusetts was declared to be in a state of
rebellion. The immediate cause of this address was the Boston Tea Party. The
lives and fortunes of his Majesty's subjects were represented as being in
danger, and he was asked to deal vigorously not only with Massachusetts but with
her sympathizers.]
[Footnote: 13. those chances. Suggested perhaps by lines in Julius Caesar, IV.,
iii., 216-219:--
"There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries."]
[Footnote: 14. according to that nature and to those circumstances. Compare with
8. Point out the connection between the thought here expressed and Burke's idea
of "expediency."]
[Footnote: 15. great consideration. This paragraph has been censured for its too
florid style. It may be rather gorgeous and rhetorical when considered as part
of an argument, yet it is very characteristic of Burke as a writer. In no other
passage of the speech is there such vivid clear-cut imagery. Note the
picturesque quality of the lines and detect if you can any confusion in
figures.]
[Footnote: 16. It is good for us to be here. Burke's favorite books were
Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible. Trace the above sentence to one of these.]
[Footnote: 17.
"Facta parentun
Jam legere et quae sit poteris cognoscere virtus."
--VIRGIL'S Eclogues, IV., 26, 27]
Notice the alteration. Already old enough to study the deeds of his father and
to know what virtue is.
[Footnote: 18. before you taste of death. Compare 16.]
[Footnote: 19. Roman charity. This suggests the more famous "Ancient Roman
honor" (Merchant of Venice, III., 11, 291). The incident referred to by Burke is
told by several writers. A father condemned to death by starvation is visited in
prison by his daughter, who secretly nourishes him with milk from her breasts.]
[Footnote: 20. complexions. "Mislike me not for my COMPLEXION."--M. V. Is the
word used in the same sense by Burke?]
[Footnote: 21. the thunder of the state. What is the classical allusion?]
[Footnote: 22. a nation is not governed.
"Who overcomes By force hath overcome but half his foe"
--Paradise Lost, 1, 648, 649.]
[Footnote: 23. Our ancient indulgence. "The wise and salutary neglect," which
Burke has just mentioned, was the result of (a) the struggle of Charles I. with
Parliament, (b) the confusion and readjustment at the Restoration, (c) the
Revolution of 1688, (d) the attitude of France in favoring the cause of the
Stuarts, (e) the ascendency of the Whigs. England had her hands full in
attending to affairs at home. As a result of this the colonies were practically
their own masters in matters of government. Also the political party known as
the Whigs had its origin shortly before William and Mary ascended the throne.
This party favored the colonies and respected their ideas of liberty and
government.]
[Footnote: 24. great contests. One instance of this is Magna Charta. Suggest
others.]
[Footnote: 25. Freedom is to them Such keen analysis and subtle reasoning is
characteristic of Burke It is this tendency that justifies some of his admirers
in calling him "Philosopher Statesman". Consider his thought attentively and
determine whether or not his argument is entirely sound. Is he correct in
speaking of our Gothic ancestors?]
[Footnote: 26. Abeunt studia in mores. Studies become a part of character.]
[Footnote: 27. winged ministers of vengeance. A figure suggested perhaps by
Horace, Odes, Bk. IV., 4: "Ministrum fulmims alitem"--the thunder's winged
messenger.]
[Footnote: 28. the circulation. The Conciliation, as all of Burke's writings, is
rich in such figurative expressions. In every instance the student should
discover the source of the figure and determine definitely whether or not his
author is accurate and suggestive.]
[Footnote: 29. its imperfections.
"But sent to my account
With all my imperfections upon my head."
--Hamlet, I, v, 78, 79.]
[Footnote: 30. same plan. The act referred to, known as the Regulating Act,
became a law May 10, 1774. It provided (a) that the council, or the higher
branch of the legislature, should be appointed by the Crown (the popular
assemblies had previously selected the members of the council); (b) that
officers of the common courts should be chosen by the royal governors, and (c)
that public meetings (except for elections) should not be held without the
sanction of the king. These measures were practically ignored. By means of
circular letters the colonies were fully instructed through their
representatives. As a direct result of the Regulating Act, along with other
high-handed proceedings of the same sort, delegates were secretly appointed for
the Continental Congress on Sept. 1 at Philadelphia. The delegates from
Massachusetts were Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Paine, and Thomas Cushing.]
[Footnote: 31. their liberties. Compare 24]
[Footnote: 32. sudden or partial view. Goodrich, in his Select British
Eloquence, speaking of Burke's comprehensiveness in discussing his subject,
compares him to one standing upon an eminence, taking a large and rounded view
of it on every side. The justice of this observation is seen in such instances
as the above. It is this breadth and clearness of vision more than anything else
that distinguishes Burke so sharply from his contemporaries.]
[Footnote: 33. three ways. How does the first differ from the third?]
[Footnote: 34. Spoliatis arma supersunt. Though plundered their arms still
remain.]
[Footnote: 35. your speech would betray you. "Thy speech bewrayeth thee"--Matt.
xxvi 73. There is much justice in the observation that Burke is often verbose,
yet such paragraphs as this prove how well he knew to condense and prune his
expression. It is an excellent plan to select from day to day passages of this
sort and commit them to memory for recitation when the speech has been
finished.]
[Footnote: 36. to persuade slaves. Does this suggest one of Byron's poems?]
[Footnote: 37. causes of quarrel. The Assembly of Virginia in 1770 attempted to
restrict the slave trade. Other colonies made the same effort, but Parliament
vetoed these measures, accompanying its action with the blunt statement that the
slave trade was profitable to England. Observe how effectively Burke uses his
wide knowledge of history.]
[Footnote: 38. ex vi termini. From the force of the word.]
[Footnote: 39. abstract right. Compare with 14; also 8. Point out connection in
thought.]
[Footnote: 40. Act of Henry the Eighth. Burke alludes to this in his letter to
the sheriffs of Bristol in the following terms: "To try a man under this Act is
to condemn him unheard. A person is brought hither in the dungeon of a ship
hold; thence he is vomited into a dungeon on land, loaded with irons,
unfurnished with money, unsupported by friends, three thousand miles from all
means of calling upon or confronting evidence, where no one local circumstance
that tends to detect perjury can possibly be judged of;--such a person may be
executed according to form, but he can never be tried according to justice."]
[Footnote: 41. correctly right. Explain.]
[Footnote: 42. Paradise Lost, II., 392-394.]
[Footnote: 43. This passage should be carefully studied. Burke's theory of
government is given in the Conciliation by just such lines as these. Refer to
other instances of principles which he considers fundamental in matters of
government.]
[Footnote: 44. exquisite. Exact meaning?]
[Footnote: 45. trade laws. What would have been the nature of a change
beneficial to the colonies?]
[Footnote: 46. English conquest. At Henry II.'s accession, 1154, Ireland had
fallen from the civilization which had once flourished upon her soil and which
had been introduced by her missionaries into England during the seventh century.
Henry II. obtained the sanction of the Pope, invaded the island, and partially
subdued the inhabitants. For an interesting account of England's relations to
Ireland the student should consult Green's Short History of the English People.]
[Footnote: 47. You deposed kings. What English kings have been deposed?]
[Footnote: 48. Lords Marchers. March, boundary. These lords were given
permission by the English kings to take from the Welsh as much land as they
could. They built their castles on the boundary line between the two countries,
and when they were not quarrelling among themselves waged a guerilla warfare
against the Welsh. The Lords Marchers, because of special privileges and the
peculiar circumstances of their life, were virtually kings--petty kings, of
course.]
[Footnote: 49. "When the clear star has shone upon the sailors, the troubled
water flows down from the rocks, the winds fall, the clouds fade away, and,
since they (Castor and Pollux) have so willed it, the threatening waves settle
on the deep."--HORACE, Odes, I., 12, 27-32.]
[Footnote: 50. Opposuit natura. Nature opposed.]
[Footnote: 51. no theory. Select other instances of Burke's impatience with
fine-spun theories in statescraft]
[Footnote: 52. Republic of Plato Utopia of More Ideal states
Consult the Century Dictionary]
[Footnote: 53.
"And the DULL swain
Treads daily on it with his clouted shoon"
--MILTON'S Comus, 6, 34, 35.]
[Footnote: 54. the year 1763 The date marks the beginning of the active struggle
between England and the American colonies. The Stamp Act was the first definite
step taken by the English Parliament in the attempt to tax the colonies without
their consent.]
[Footnote: 55. legal competency. This had been practically recognized by
Parliament prior to the passage of the Stamp Act. In Massachusetts the Colonial
Assembly had made grants from year to year to the governor, both for his salary
and the incidental expenses of his office. Notwithstanding the fact that he was
appointed (in most cases) by the Crown, and invariably had the ear of the Lords
of Trade, the colonies generally had things their own way and enjoyed a
political freedom greater, perhaps, than did the people of England.]
[Footnote: 56. This is not my doctrine, but that of Ofellus; a rustic, yet
unusually wise]
[Footnote: 57. Compare in point of style with 43, 22-25; 44, 1-6 In what way do
such passages differ from Burke's prevailng style? What is the central thought
in each paragraph?]
[Footnote: 58. misguided people. There is little doubt that the colonists m many
instances were misrepresented by the Lords of Trade and by the royal governors.
See an interesting account of this in Fiske's American Revolution.]
[Footnote: 59. an Act. Passed in 1767. It provided for a duty on imports,
including tea, glass, and paper.]
[Footnote: 60 An Act. Boston Post Bill.]
[Footnote: 61. impartial administration of justice. This provided that if any
person in Massachusetts were charged with murder, or any other capital offence,
he should be tried either in some other colony or in Great Britain]
[Footnote: 62. An Act for the better regulating See 87, 23. ]
[Footnote: 63. Trial of Treasons See 50, 20.]
[Footnote: 64. de jure. According to law. de facto. According to fact.]
[Footnote: 65. jewel of his soul.
"Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls"
--Othello, III, iii, 155,156.]
[Footnote: 66. proposition of a ransom. See 8, 13.]
[Footnote: 67. An experiment upon something of no value.]
[Footnote: 68. They stake their fortune and play.]
[Footnote: 69. Such a presumption Is Burke right in this? Select instances which
seem to warrant rest such a presumption. Discuss the political parties of
Burke's own day from this point of view.]
[Footnote: 70. What can you say about the style of this passage? Note the
figure, sentence structure, and diction. Does it seem artificial and
overwrought? Compare it with 43, 22-25; 44. 1-6; also with 90, 23-25, 91, 1-25,
92, 1-23.]
[Footnote: 71. enemies. France and Spain.]
[Footnote: 72. light as air.
"Trifles light as air
Are to the jealous confirmations strong
As proofs of holy writ"
--Othello, III, iii, 322-324]
[Footnote: 73. grapple to you.
"The friends thou hast and their adoption tried
Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel"
--Hamlet, I., iii, 62,63.]
[Footnote: 74. the cement is gone. Figure?]
[Footnote: 75. profane herd.
"Odi profanum volgus et arceo"
I hate the vulgar herd and keep it from me
--Horace, Odes, III, 1, 1]
[Footnote: 76. Magnanimity. Etymology?]
[Footnote: 77. auspicate Etymology and derivation?]
[Footnote: 78. Sursum corda. Lift up your hearts.]
[Footnote: 79. quod felix faustumque sit. May it be happy and fortunate.]
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