Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

modities 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 5 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 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.

10

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 15 ties which, though light as air, 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, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be 20 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 gonethe cohesion is loosened- and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep 25 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 30 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 35 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 5 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 10 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 15 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 20 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 25 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 30 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 mate- 35

84

EDMUND BURKE ON CONCILIATION.

rial, 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 5 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 station, and glow with 10 zeal to fill our places as becomes our situation 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 15 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 20 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, lay the first stone of the Temple of 25 Peace; and I move you—

30

"That the Colonies and Plantations of Great Britain in North Amer

ica, 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."

QUOTATIONS.

Perhaps the greatest speech he ever made was that on conciliation with America; the wisest in its temper, the most closely logical in its reasoning, the amplest in appropriate topics, the most generous and conciliatory in the substance of its appeals. Yet Erskine, who was in the House when this was delivered, said that it drove everybody away, including people who, when they came to read it, read it over and over again, and could hardly think of anything else. Burke's gestures were clumsy; he had sonorous but harsh tones; he never lost a strong Irish accent; and his utterance was often hurried and eager. Apart from these disadvantages of accident, which have been overcome by men infinitely inferior to Burke, it is easy to perceive, from the matter and texture of the speeches that have become English classics, that the very qualities which are excellences in literature were drawbacks to the spoken discourses. A listener in Westminster Hall or the House of Commons, unlike the reader by his fireside in the next century, is always thinking of arguments and facts that bear directly on the special issue before him. What he wishes to hear is some particularity of event or inference which will either help him to make up his mind or will justify him if his mind is already made up. Burke never neglected these particularities, and he never went so wide as to fall for an instant into vagueness, but he went wide enough into the generalities that lent force and light to his view, to weary men who cared for nothing, and could not be expected to care for anything, but the business actually in hand and the most expeditious way through it. The conscientiousness is not close enough and rapid enough to hold the interest of a practical assembly, which, though it was a hundred times less busy than the House of Commons to-day, seems to have been eager in the inverse proportion of what it had to do, to get that little quickly done. — MORLEY, Life of Burke.

His deficiencies in knowledge and in rhetoric, Rockingham compensated by selecting as his secretary and intimate friend Edmund Burke, who had recently left the service of one of the opposite party, and renounced a pension bestowed by Halifax. It was characteristic

85

of that period for a man like Rockingham to hold for life a retainer like Edmund Burke; and never did a true-hearted, kindly, and generous patron find one more faithful. He brought to his employer, and gave up to his party, all that he had: boundless stores of knowledge, especially respecting the colonies; wit, philosophy, imagination, gorgeous eloquence, unwearied industry, mastery of the English tongue, and a most accomplished intellect. His ambition was fervid, yet content with the applause of the aristocracy. His writings are a brilliant picture of the British constitution as it existed in the best days of the eighteenth century; and his genius threw luster over the decline of the party which he served. No man more thoroughly hated oppression; but he possessed neither experience in affairs nor tranquil judgment, nor the rule over his own spirit, so that his genius wrought much evil to his country and to Europe, even while he rendered noble service to the cause of commercial freedom, to Ireland, and to America. - BANCROFT.

De Quincey justly describes Burke as "the supreme writer of his century." No writer of that century is to be compared with him as regards command of English expression. With equal justice, as it seems to us, he is described by Carlyle as "a man vehement rather than earnest; a resplendent, far-sighted Rhetorician, rather than a deep, sure Thinker." Others who eagerly and somewhat perversely question this judgment of Carlyle's maintain him to have been "a man of the highest genius, taking rank with Shakespeare and Bacon." There is no necessary discrepancy between these views, if only we recognize diversity of gifts, and cease to advance impossible claims for our authors. Burke may have had as much intellectual force as either Shakespeare or Bacon, although it displayed itself in a different line. To be such a rhetorician as he was implies no common powersimmense resources of expression and illustration, a wide and ready command of facts, and fertile and far-sighted ingenuity in arranging facts and principles for the purposes of persuasion. To be among the foremost rhetoricians demands probably as great intellectual power of its kind as to be among the foremost poets or the foremost men of science.

One great feature in his statesmanship was his consistent endeavor to introduce into the conduct of affairs between nation and nation higher principles of morality. Nations should be humane, just, and generous in their dealings with men; what is immoral for a man is equally immoral for a nation. - MINTO.

« ZurückWeiter »