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MR SPEAKER,

EDMUND BURKE

(1729-1797)

CONCILIATION WITH THE American COLONIES, 22 March 1775

It is good for us to be here. 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 10 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

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iam legere, et quae sit poterit cognoscere virtusSuppose, 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 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 honour 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, scarce 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, 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 a succession of civilising conquests and civilising 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!

I pass from the commerce of the colonies to 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. . . . 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, 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, . . . 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 go 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 100 dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise ever carried this most perilous mode of

hard 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.

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 110 of gaining them. . But I confess,

my opinion is much more in favour of prudent management than of force; considering force not only 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 120 the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed 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.

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A further objection to force is, that you 130 impair the object by your very endeavours 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 British strength that I consume. . . . Let me add, that I do not choose wholly to break the American spirit; because it is the 140 spirit that has made the country.

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 150 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. ...

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 160 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. 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 170 they found that beat, they thought themselves sick or sound.

For all service, whether of revenue, trade, or empire, my trust is in the interest of America 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, are as strong as links of iron. Let the 180 colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government;-they will cling and grapple to you; and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. . . 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 190 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 200 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 210 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 220 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 230 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.]

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minds go ill together. If we are conscious of our situation, and glow with zeal to fill our place as becomes our station and ourselves, we aught to auspicate all our public proceedings on America with the old warning of the church, Sursum corda! 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, 250 our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire; and have made the most extensive, and the only honourable conquests, by not destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race.

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IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS WESTMINSTER HALL, 4 February 1788

I CHARGE Mr Hastings . . . with having destroyed the whole system of government, which he had no right to destroy, in the six provincial councils. I charge him with having delegated away that power which the Act of Parliament had directed him to preserve unalienably in himself. I charge him with having formed an ostensible committee to be instruments and tools, at the enormous expense of £62,000 a-year. I charge him with having appointed a person, Dewan, to whom those tools were to be subservient; a man, whose name, to his own knowledge, by his own general recorded official transactions, by everything that can make a man known, abhorred, and detested, was stamped with infamy; with giving him this whole power, which he had thus separated from the council-general, and from the provincial councils. I charge him with taking bribes of Gunga Govind Sing. I charge him that he has not done that bribeduty with fidelity; for there is something like a fidelity in the transactions of the very worst of men. I charge him with having robbed those people of whom he took the bribes. I charge him with having alienated the fortunes of widows. I charge him with having, without right, title, or purchase, taken away the lands of orphans, and given them to the very person under whose protection those orphans were. I charge him with giving those very zemindaries to the most wicked of persons, knowing his wickedness; with having committed to him that great country, and with having wasted the country, destroyed the landed interest, cruelly harassed the peasants,

burnt their houses, and destroyed the crops. charge him with having tortured and dishonoured their persons, and destroyed the honour of the whole female race of that 40 country. This I charge upon him in the name of the Commons of England.

Now, my Lords, what is it in this last moment that we want besides the cause of justice the cause of oppressed princes, of undone women of the first rank, of desolated provinces, and of wasted kingdoms? Do you want a criminal, my Lords? When was there so much iniquity applied to any one? No, my Lords, with respect to India, you must not 50 look to punish in India more; for Mr Hastings has not left substance enough in Asia to punish such another delinquent. My Lords, if a prosecutor you want, the Commons of Great Britain appear to prosecute. You have before

you the Commons of Great Britain as prosecutors; and I believe, my Lords, I may venture to say, that the sun in his beneficent progress does not behold a more glorious sight, than to see those who are separated by the 60 material bounds and barriers of nature united by the bond of social and natural humanity; and all the Commons of England resenting as their own, the indignities and cruelties that have been offered to the people of India. My Lords, permit me to add, neither do we want a tribunal; for a greater tribunal than the present, no example of antiquity, nor anything in the world, can supply. My Lords, here we see, virtually in the mind's eye, the sacred 70 minister of the Crown, under whose authority you sit, and whose power you exercise. In

that invisible authority, which we all feel the energy and life of, we see the protecting power of his Majesty. We have also, my Lords, sitting in judgment, in this great and august assembly, the Heir Apparent to the Crown, such as the fond wishes of the people of England desire an heir apparent to be. We have here all the nobles of England, offering themselves as a pledge for the support of the rights of the Crown, and the liberties of the people. We have here, my Lords, a great hereditary peerage; we have those who have their own honour, the honour of their ancestors, and the honour of their posterity to guard; and who, while they inherit the virtues of those ancestors, will be anxious to transmit them to that posterity. My Lords, we have also here a new nobility, who have raised themselves by their integrity, their virtue, and their magnanimity, and those who, by their various talents and abilities, have been exalted to a situation, by the wisdom and bounty of their sovereign, which they well deserve, and which may justify that favour, and secure to them the good opinion of their fellow-subjects. These will be equally careful not to sully those honours. My Lords, we have here > persons highly exalted in the practice of the law, who come to sit in this tribunal, to enlighten it, and to strengthen and promote those principles which they have maintained in their respective courts below. These being ennobled for their superior knowledge, will, no doubt, see that the law is justly and impartially administered. My Lords, you have here also the lights of our holy religion, the bishops of our church. Here we behold the 10 true image of the most uncorrupted religion, in its primitive and ancient forms; here you behold it in its primitive ordinances, purified from the superstitions that are but too apt to dis

See also TAXATION OF AMERICA

grace the best institutions in the world. You have here the representatives of that religion, which says, that God is a God of love, that of those institutions the very vital spirit is charity, and that it so much hates oppression, that when the God whom we adore appeared in human form, He did not appear in greatness of 120 majesty, but in sympathy to the lower people, and made it a firm principle, that in that government which He who is Master of nature, and who appeared in our humble form, has established, of the flock that feed and those that feed them, he who is called first among them is and ought to be the servant of the

rest.

My Lords, these are our securities; we rest upon them; we reckon upon them; and we 130 commit, with confidence, the interests of India and of humanity to your hands. Therefore it is, that, ordered by the House of Commons of Great Britain, I impeach Warren Hastings of high crimes and misdemeanours.

I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, whose parliamentary trust he has abused.

I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain, whose national character he 140 has dishonoured.

I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights, and liberties he has subverted.

I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose properties he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and desolate.

I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both sexes. And I impeach 150 him in the name and by the virtue of those eternal laws of justice, which aught equally to pervade every age, condition, rank, and situation in the world.

19 April 1774.-Contains the passage about a cabinet curiously inlaid''Chatham-Charles Townshend.' 'I have done with the third period of your policy. In the ideas of all' (with omissions).

REFLEXIONS

Marie Antoinette at Versailles.

ON A REGICIDE PEACE

Character of William III.

TO THE ELECTORS OF BRISTOL

6 September 1780.-The Peroration.

MR FOX'S INDIA BILL

HOUSE OF COMMONS, 1 December 1783.-Panegyric of Charles Fox.'And now having done'-' species.'

ON THE DEBTS OF THE NABOB OF ARCO1

HOUSE OF COMMONS, 28 February 1785.-'Among the victims'

ruin.'

-" its

OPENING OF THE IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS

-'the laws of his country.' -'of your justice.' (c).—' My

15 February 1788.—(a).-' My lords, I confess'
(b). My lords, in the next place'-
lords, you have now heard '- -'Asiatic Governments.'

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GEORGE CANNING

(1770-1827)

ON THE ARMY ESTIMATES

PITT AND BUONAPARTE.

HOUSE OF COMMONS, 8 December 1802

... If I am pushed to the wall, and forced to speak my opinion, I have no disguise nor reservation; I do think that this is a time when the administration of the Government ought to be in the ablest and fittest hands: I do not think the hands in which it is now placed answer to that description; I do not pretend to conceal in what quarter I think that fitness most eminently resides; I do not subscribe to the doctrines which have been advanced, that in times like the present the fitness of individuals for their political situation is no part of the consideration to which a member of Parliament may fairly turn his attention. Away with the cant of 'measures, not men!' the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along! No, Sir, if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures comparatively nothing. I speak, Sir, of times of difficulty and danger; of times when systems are shaken, when precedents and general rules of conduct fail. Then it is, that not to this or that measure, however prudently devised, however blameless in execution, but to the energy and character of individuals, a state must be indebted for its salvation. Then it is that kingdoms rise or fall in proportion as they are upheld, not by well-meant endeavours (laudable though they may be), but by commanding, over-awing talents; by able men. And what is the nature of the times in which we live? Look at France, and see what we have to cope

with, and consider what has made her what she is? A man. You will tell me that she was great, and powerful, and formidable, before the date of Buonaparte's government; that he found in her great physical and moral resources; that he had but to turn them to account. True, and he did so.-Compare the situation in which he found France with that to which he has raised her. I am no panegyrist of Buonaparte; but I cannot shut my eyes to the superiority of his talents, to the amazing ascendant of his genius. Tell me not of his measures, and his policy. It is his genius, his character, that keeps the world in awe. Sir, to meet, to check, to curb, to stand up against him, we want arms of the same kind. I am far from objecting to the large military establishments which are proposed to I vote for them with all my heart. for the purpose of coping with Buonaparte, one great commanding spirit is worth them all. This is my undisguised opinion. But when I state this opinion thus undisguisedly, is my right honourable friend to be implicated in a charge of prompting what I say?... Is there anything in the life of that right honour- 60 able gentleman, is there anything in the last years of his life, to justify such an accusation? No, Sir. Never did young ambition just struggling into public notice, and aiming at popular favour, labour with half so much earnestness to court reputation, and to conciliate adherents, as my right honourable friend has laboured, since his retreat from office, not

you.

But

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