by Edmund Burke
The reasons, dread Sir, which have been used to justify this perseverance in a refusal to hear or conciliate have been reduced into a sort of Parliamentary maxims which we do not approve. The first of these maxims is, “that the two Houses ought not to receive (as they have hitherto refused to receive) petitions containing matter derogatory to any part of the authority they claim.” We conceive this maxim and the consequent practice to be unjustifiable by reason or the practice of other sovereign powers, and that it must be productive, if adhered to, of a total separation between this kingdom and its dependencies. The supreme power, being in ordinary cases the ultimate judge, can, as we conceive, suffer nothing in having any part of his rights excepted to, or even discussed before himself. We know that sovereigns in other countries, where the assertion of absolute regal power is as high as the assertion of absolute power in any politic body can possibly be here, have received many petitions in direct opposition to many of their claims of prerogative, — have listened to them, — condescended to discuss, and to give answers to them. This refusal to admit even the discussion of any part of an undefined prerogative will naturally tend to annihilate any privilege that can be claimed by every inferior dependent community, and every subordinate order in the state.
The next maxim which has been put as a bar to any plan of accommodation is, “that no offer of terms of peace ought to be made, before Parliament is assured that these terms will be accepted.” On this we beg leave to represent to your Majesty, that, if, in all events, the policy of this kingdom is to govern the people in your colonies as a free people, no mischief can possibly happen from a declaration to them, and to the world, of the manner and form in which Parliament proposes that they shall enjoy the freedom it protects. It is an encouragement to the innocent and meritorious, that they at least shall enjoy those advantages which they patiently expected rather from the benignity of Parliament than their own efforts. Persons more contumacious may also see that they are resisting terms of perhaps greater freedom and happiness than they are now in arms to obtain. The glory and propriety of offered mercy is neither tarnished nor weakened by the folly of those who refuse to take advantage of it.
We cannot think that the declaration of independency makes any natural difference in the reason and policy of the offer. No prince out of the possession of his dominions, and become a sovereign de jure only, ever thought it derogatory to his rights or his interests to hold out to his former subjects a distinct prospect of the advantages to be derived from his readmission, and a security for some of the most fundamental of those popular privileges in vindication of which he had been deposed. On the contrary, such offers have been almost uniformly made under similar circumstances. Besides, as your Majesty has been graciously pleased, in your speech from the throne, to declare your intention of restoring your people in the colonies to a state of law and liberty, no objection can possibly lie against defining what that law and liberty are; because those who offer and those who are to receive terms frequently differ most widely and most materially in the signification of these words, and in the objects to which they apply.
To say that we do not know, at this day, what the grievances of the colonies are (be they real or pretended) would be unworthy of us. But whilst we are thus waiting to be informed of what we perfectly know, we weaken the powers of the commissioners, — we delay, perhaps we lose, the happy hour of peace, — we are wasting the substance of both countries, — we are continuing the effusion of human, of Christian, of English blood.
We are sure that we must have your Majesty’s heart along with us, when we declare in favor of mixing something conciliatory with our force. Sir, we abhor the idea of making a conquest of our countrymen. We wish that they may yield to well-ascertained, well-authenticated, and well-secured terms of reconciliation, — not that your Majesty should owe the recovery of your dominions to their total waste and destruction. Humanity will not permit us to entertain such a desire; nor will the reverence we bear to the civil rights of mankind make us even wish that questions of great difficulty, of the last importance, and lying deep in the vital principles of the British Constitution, should be solved by the arms of foreign mercenary soldiers.
It is not, Sir, from a want of the most inviolable duty to your Majesty, not from a want of a partial and passionate regard to that part of your empire in which we reside, and which we wish to be supreme, that we have hitherto withstood all attempts to render the supremacy of one part of your dominions inconsistent with the liberty and safety of all the rest. The motives of our opposition are found in those very sentiments which we are supposed to violate. For we are convinced beyond a doubt, that a system of dependence which leaves no security to the people for any part of their freedom in their own hands cannot be established in any inferior member of the British empire, without consequentially destroying the freedom of that very body in favor of whose boundless pretensions such a scheme is adopted. We know and feel that arbitrary power over distant regions is not within the competence, nor to be exercised agreeably to the forms or consistently with the spirit, of great popular assemblies. If such assemblies are called to a nominal share in the exercise of such power, in order to screen, under general participation, the guilt of desperate measures, it tends only the more deeply to corrupt the deliberative character of those assemblies, in training them to blind obedience, in habituating them to proceed upon grounds of fact with which they can rarely be sufficiently acquainted, and in rendering them executive instruments of designs the bottom of which they cannot possibly fathom.
To leave any real freedom to Parliament, freedom must be left to the colonies. A military government is the only substitute for civil liberty. That the establishment of such a power in America will utterly ruin our finances (though its certain effect) is the smallest part of our concern. It will become an apt, powerful, and certain engine for the destruction of our freedom here. Great bodies of armed men, trained to a contempt of popular assemblies representative of an English people, — kept up for the purpose of exacting impositions without their consent, and maintained by that exaction, — instruments in subverting, without any process of law, great ancient establishments and respected forms of governments, — set free from, and therefore above, the ordinary English tribunals of the country where they serve, — these men cannot so transform themselves, merely by crossing the sea, as to behold with love and reverence, and submit with profound obedience to, the very same things in Great Britain which in America they had been taught to despise, and had been accustomed to awe and humble. All your Majesty’s troops, in the rotation of service, will pass through this discipline and contract these habits. If we could flatter ourselves that this would not happen, we must be the weakest of men; we must be the worst, if we were indifferent whether it happened or not. What, gracious sovereign, is the empire of America to us, or the empire of the world, if we lose our own liberties? We deprecate this last of evils. We deprecate the effect of the doctrines which must support and countenance the government over conquered Englishmen.
As it will be impossible long to resist the powerful and equitable arguments in favor of the freedom of these unhappy people that are to be drawn from the principle of our own liberty, attempts will be made, attempts have been made, to ridicule and to argue away this principle, and to inculcate into the minds of your people other maxims of government and other grounds of obedience than those which have prevailed at and since the glorious Revolution. By degrees, these doctrines, by being convenient, may grow prevalent. The consequence is not certain; but a general change of principles rarely happens among a people without leading to a change of government.
Sir, your throne cannot stand secure upon the principles of unconditional submission and passive obedience, — on powers exercised without the concurrence of the people to be governed, — on acts made in defiance of their prejudices and habits, — on acquiescence procured by foreign mercenary troops, and secured by standing armies. These may possibly be the foundation of other thrones
: they must be the subversion of yours. It was not to passive principles in our ancestors that we owe the honor of appearing before a sovereign who cannot feel that he is a prince without knowing that we ought to be free. The Revolution is a departure from the ancient course of the descent of this monarchy. The people at that time reentered into their original rights; and it was not because a positive law authorized what was then done, but because the freedom and safety of the subject, the origin and cause of all laws, required a proceeding paramount and superior to them. At that ever memorable and instructive period, the letter of the law was superseded in favor of the substance of liberty. To the free choice, therefore, of the people, without either King or Parliament, we owe that happy establishment out of which both King and Parliament were regenerated. From that great principle of liberty have originated the statutes confirming and ratifying the establishment from which your Majesty derives your right to rule over us. Those statutes have not given us our liberties: our liberties have produced them. Every hour of your Majesty’s reign, your title stands upon the very same foundation on which it was at first laid; and we do not know a better on which it can possibly be placed.
Convinced, Sir, that you cannot have different rights and a different security in different parts of your dominions, we wish to lay an even platform for your throne, and to give it an unmovable stability, by laying it on the general freedom of your people, and by securing to your Majesty that confidence and affection in all parts of your dominions which makes your best security and dearest title in this the chief seat of your empire.
Such, Sir, being, amongst us, the foundation of monarchy itself, much more clearly and much more peculiarly is it the ground of all Parliamentary power. Parliament is a security provided for the protection of freedom, and not a subtile fiction, contrived to amuse the people in its place. The authority of both Houses can still less than that of the crown be supported upon different principles in different places, so as to be for one part of your subjects a protector of liberty, and for another a fund of despotism, through which prerogative is extended by occasional powers, whenever an arbitrary will finds itself straitened by the restrictions of law. Had it seemed good to Parliament to consider itself as the indulgent guardian and strong protector of the freedom of the subordinate popular assemblies, instead of exercising its powers to their annihilation, there is no doubt that it never could have been their inclination, because not their interest, to raise questions on the extent of Parliamentary rights, or to enfeeble privileges which were the security of their own. Powers evident from necessity, and not suspicious from an alarming mode or purpose in the exertion, would, as formerly they were, be cheerfully submitted to; and these would have been fully sufficient for conservation of unity in the empire, and for directing its wealth to one common centre. Another use has produced other consequences; and a power which refuses to be limited by moderation must either be lost, or find other more distinct and satisfactory limitations.
As for us, a supposed, or, if it could be, a real, participation in arbitrary power would never reconcile our minds to its establishment. We should be ashamed to stand before your Majesty, boldly asserting in our own favor inherent rights which bind and regulate the crown itself, and yet insisting on the exercise, in our own persons, of a more arbitrary sway over our fellow-citizens and fellow-freemen.
These, gracious sovereign, are the sentiments which we consider ourselves as bound, in justification of our present conduct, in the most serious and solemn manner to lay at your Majesty’s feet. We have been called by your Majesty’s writs and proclamations, and we have been authorized, either by hereditary privilege or the choice of your people, to confer and treat with your Majesty, in your highest councils, upon the arduous affairs of your kingdom. We are sensible of the whole importance of the duty which this constitutional summons implies. We know the religious punctuality of attendance which, in the ordinary course, it demands. It is no light cause which, even for a time, could persuade us to relax in any part of that attendance. The British empire is in convulsions which threaten its dissolution. Those particular proceedings which cause and inflame this disorder, after many years’ incessant struggle, we find ourselves wholly unable to oppose and unwilling to behold. All our endeavors having proved fruitless, we are fearful at this time of irritating by contention those passions which we have found it impracticable to compose by reason. We cannot permit ourselves to countenance, by the appearance of a silent assent, proceedings fatal to the liberty and unity of the empire, — proceedings which exhaust the strength of all your Majesty’s dominions, destroy all trust and dependence of our allies, and leave us, both at home and abroad, exposed to the suspicious mercy and uncertain inclinations of our neighbor and rival powers, to whom, by this desperate course, we are driving our countrymen for protection, and with whom we have forced them into connections, and may bind them by habits and by interests, — an evil which no victories that may be obtained, no severities which may be exorcised, ever will or can remove.
If but the smallest hope should from any circumstances appear of a return to the ancient maxims and true policy of this kingdom, we shall with joy and readiness return to our attendance, in order to give our hearty support to whatever means may be left for alleviating the complicated evils which oppress this nation.
If this should not happen, we have discharged our consciences by this faithful representation to your Majesty and our country; and however few in number, or however we may be overborne by practices whose operation is but too powerful, by the revival of dangerous exploded principles, or by the misguided zeal of such arbitrary factions as formerly prevailed in this kingdom, and always to its detriment and disgrace, we have the satisfaction of standing forth and recording our names in assertion of those principles whose operation hath, in better times, made your Majesty a great prince, and the British dominions a mighty empire.
ADDRESS TO THE BRITISH COLONISTS IN NORTH AMERICA.
The very dangerous crisis into which the British empire is brought, as it accounts for, so it justifies, the unusual step we take in addressing ourselves to you.
The distempers of the state are grown to such a degree of violence and malignity as to render all ordinary remedies vain and frivolous. In such a deplorable situation, an adherence to the common forms of business appears to us rather as an apology to cover a supine neglect of duty than the means of performing it in a manner adequate to the exigency that presses upon us. The common means we have already tried, and tried to no purpose. As our last resource, we turn ourselves to you. We address you merely in our private capacity, vested with no other authority than what will naturally attend those in whose declarations of benevolence you have no reason to apprehend any mixture of dissimulation or design.
We have this title to your attention: we call upon it in a moment of the utmost importance to us all. We find, with infinite concern, that arguments are used to persuade you of the necessity of separating yourselves from your ancient connection with your parent country, grounded on a supposition that a general principle of alienation and enmity to you had pervaded the whole of this kingdom, and that there does no longer subsist between you and us any common and kindred principles upon which we can possibly unite, consistently with those ideas of liberty in which you have justly placed your whole happiness.
If this fact were true, the inference drawn from it would be irresistible. But nothing is less founded. We admit, indeed, that violent addresses have been procured with uncommon pains by wicked and designing men, purporting to be the genuine voice of the whole people of England, — that they have been published by authority here, and made known to you by proclamations, in order, by despair and resentment, incurably to poison your minds against the origin of your race, and to render all cordial reconciliation between us utterly impracticable. The same wicked men, for the same bad purposes, have so far surprised the justice of Parliament as to cut off all communication betwixt us, except what is to go in their own fallacious and hostil
e channel.
But we conjure you by the invaluable pledges which have hitherto united, and which we trust will hereafter lastingly unite us, that you do not suffer yourselves to be persuaded or provoked into an opinion that you are at war with this nation. Do not think that the whole, or even the uninfluenced majority, of Englishmen in this island are enemies to their own blood on the American continent. Much delusion has been practised, much corrupt influence treacherously employed. But still a large, and we trust the largest and soundest, part of this kingdom perseveres in the most perfect unity of sentiments, principles, and affections with you. It spreads out a large and liberal platform of common liberty, upon which we may all unite forever. It abhors the hostilities which have been carried on against you, as much as you who feel the cruel effect of them. It has disclaimed in the most solemn manner, at the foot of the throne itself, the addresses which tended to irritate your sovereign against his colonies. We are persuaded that even many of those who unadvisedly have put their hands to such intemperate and inflammatory addresses have not at all apprehended to what such proceedings naturally lead, and would sooner die than afford them the least countenance, if they were sensible of their fatal effects on the union and liberty of the empire.
For ourselves, we faithfully assure you, that we have ever considered you as rational creatures, as free agents, as men willing to pursue and able to discern your own true interest. We have wished to continue united with you, in order that a people of one origin and one character should be directed to the rational objects of government by joint counsels, and protected in them by a common force. Other subordination in you we require none. We have never pressed that argument of general union to the extinction of your local, natural, and just privileges. Sensible of what is due both to the dignity and weakness of man, we have never wished to place over you any government, over which, in great, fundamental points, you should have no sort of check or control in your own hands, or which should be repugnant to your situation, principles, and character.
