Edmund Burke (1729-1797), was an Irish
statesman, author, and political philosopher. After moving to England he served
for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member
of the Whig party. “Lord North's long administration (1770-1782) was
marked by the unsuccessful coercion of the American colonies, by corruption,
extravagance, and reaction. Against this policy Burke and his Whig friends
could only raise a strong protest. The best of Burke's writings and speeches
belong to this period, and may be described as a defense of sound
constitutional statesmanship against prevailing abuse and misgovernment.”[1] His speech on March 22, 1775 before Parliament on the subject of “Conciliation with America” is
to be remembered for its wise and insightful counsel to his nation to pursue
peace, magnanimity, and uphold British rights & privileges:
“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.
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.
Let the 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. 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, 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 this 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, vivffles every part of the empire, even down to the
minutest member.
Is it not the same virtue which does
every thing 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 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 in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great
empire and little minds go ill together. If we are conscious of our situation,
and glow with zeal to fill our places as becomes our station and ourselves, we
ought 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, 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.”
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