by Edmund Burke
CONTENTS
SPEECH ON AMERICAN TAXATION. APRIL 19, 1774.
SPEECHES AT HIS ARRIVAL AT BRISTOL, AND AT THE CONCLUSION OF THE POLL. 1774
SPEECH ON MOVING HIS RESOLUTIONS FOR CONCILIATION WITH THE COLONIES. MARCH 22, 1775.
SPEECH ON PRESENTING TO THE HOUSE OF COMMONS (ON THE 11TH FEBRUARY, 1780)
SPEECH AT THE GUILDHALL IN BRISTOL, PREVIOUS TO THE LATE ELECTION IN THAT CITY, UPON CERTAIN POINTS RELATIVE TO HIS PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT. 1780.
SPEECH AT BRISTOL, ON DECLINING THE POLL. 1780.
SPEECH UPON THE QUESTION FOR THE SPEAKER’S LEAVING THE CHAIR IN ORDER FOR THE HOUSE TO RESOLVE ITSELF INTO A COMMITTEE ON MR. FOX’S EAST INDIA BILL. (DECEMBER 1, 1783)
SPEECH ON THE MOTION MADE FOR PAPERS RELATIVE TO THE DIRECTIONS FOR CHARGING THE NABOB OF ARCOT’S PRIVATE DEBTS TO EUROPEANS ON THE REVENUES OF THE CARNATIC, FEBRUARY 28, 1785. WITH AN APPENDIX, CONTAINING SEVERAL DOCUMENTS.
SUBSTANCE OF THE SPEECH IN THE DEBATE ON THE ARMY ESTIMATES IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, ON TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1790 COMPREHENDING A DISCUSSION OF THE PRESENT SITUATION OF AFFAIRS IN FRANCE.
SPEECH ON THE ACTS OF UNIFORMITY FEBRUARY 6, 1772.
SPEECH ON A BILL FOR THE RELIEF OF PROTESTANT DISSENTERS. MARCH 17, 1773.
SPEECH ON A MOTION MADE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS BY THE RIGHT HON. C.J. FOX, MAY 11, 1793, FOR LEAVE TO BRING IN A BILL TO REPEAL AND ALTER CERTAIN ACTS RESPECTING RELIGIOUS OPINIONS, UPON THE OCCASION OF A PETITION OF THE UNITARIAN SOCIETY
SPEECH ON THE MOTION MADE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, FEBRUARY 7, 1771, RELATIVE TO THE MIDDLESEX ELECTION.
SPEECH ON A BILL FOR SHORTENING THE DURATION OF PARLIAMENTS. MAY 8, 1780.
SPEECH ON A MOTION MADE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, MAY 7, 1782, FOR A COMMITTEE TO INQUIRE INTO THE STATE OF THE REPRESENTATION OF THE COMMONS IN PARLIAMENT.
SPEECH ON A MOTION, MADE BY THE RIGHT HON. WILLIAM DOWDESWELL, MARCH 7, 1771, FOR LEAVE TO BRING IN A BILL FOR EXPLAINING THE POWERS OF JURIES IN PROSECUTIONS FOR LIBELS. TOGETHER WITH A LETTER IN VINDICATION OF THAT MEASURE, AND A COPY OF THE PROPOSED BILL.
SPEECH ON A BILL FOR THE REPEAL OF THE MARRIAGE ACT. JUNE 15, 1781.
SPEECH ON A MOTION MADE IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, FEBRUARY 17, 1772, FOR LEAVE TO BRING IN A BILL TO QUIET THE POSSESSIONS OF THE SUBJECT AGAINST DORMANT CLAIMS OF THE CHURCH.
SPEECHES IN THE IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS, ESQUIRE, LATE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF BENGAL. SPEECH IN OPENING. FEBRUARY, 1788.
SPEECHES IN THE IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS, ESQUIRE LATE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF BENGAL. SPEECH IN OPENING. (CONTINUED.) FEBRUARY, 1788.
SPEECH IN OPENING THE IMPEACHMENT. FOURTH DAY: TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1788.
SPEECHES IN THE IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS, ESQUIRE, LATE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF BENGAL.
SPEECH ON THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE. SECOND DAY: SATURDAY, APRIL 25, 1789.
SPEECH ON THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE. THIRD DAY: TUESDAY, MAY 5, 1789.
SPEECH ON THE SIXTH ARTICLE OF CHARGE. FOURTH DAY: THURSDAY, MAY 7, 1789.
SPEECHES IN THE IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS, ESQUIRE, LATE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF BENGAL. SPEECH IN GENERAL REPLY. MAY AND JUNE, 1794.
SPEECH IN GENERAL REPLY. SECOND DAY: FRIDAY, MAY 30, 1794.
SPEECH IN GENERAL REPLY. THIRD DAY: TUESDAY, JUNE 3, 1794.
SPEECH IN GENERAL REPLY. FOURTH DAY: THURSDAY, JUNE 5, 1794.
SPEECH IN GENERAL REPLY. FIFTH DAY: SATURDAY, JUNE 7, 1794.
SPEECH IN GENERAL REPLY. SIXTH DAY, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 11, 1794.
SPEECH IN GENERAL REPLY. SEVENTH DAY. THURSDAY, JUNE 12, 1794.
SPEECH IN GENERAL REPLY. EIGHTH DAY: SATURDAY, JUNE 14, 1794.
SPEECH IN GENERAL REPLY. NINTH DAY: MONDAY, JUNE 16, 1794.
SPEECH ON AMERICAN TAXATION. APRIL 19, 1774.
This famous speech was delivered in the British House of Commons on April 19, 1774, advocating the full repeal of the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767. Parliament had previously repealed five of the six duties of this revenue tax on the American colonies, but the tax on tea remained. The speech was given during the debates on the Coercive Acts, when Rose Fuller proposed that the Townshend duty on tea be repealed to decrease resistance to the new acts. Burke’s speech was in support of this motion. Celebrated for its wit and brilliant reconstruction of the government’s dismal efforts to bring order into colonial affairs without the advantage of a coherent policy, it is considered to be among Burke’s greatest speeches.
By the spring of 1774, Burke had come to believe that affairs between Britain and the colonies were reaching an important moment. Though he did not believe a break was imminent, he knew the situation was serious. When a debate was held in Parliament related to a motion to repeal the Tea Act, he took the opportunity to speak. He intended to give a general warning about British policy, but not necessarily to propose many specific remedies.
The core arguments of the speech concern the powers of Parliament and its right to tax the colonies. The speech opens with a discussion of the history of British colonialism going back to the Navigation Acts. Burke argues that these acts had not significantly infringed upon the rights of the colonists to tax themselves, since the majority of this authority was still retained in the colonial assemblies. Furthermore, they were acts that taxed commerce rather than direct taxes created solely for the purpose of raising revenue. With the implementation of the Stamp Act and ensuing revenue acts in the 1760s, this situation had changed. He therefore proposes an underlying theory for a new policy towards colonial taxation that might resolve the impasse.
Burke agrees that Parliament had the right to tax the colonies, but only as a last resort when it was necessary to preserve the empire, what he calls a ‘reserve power’. Such dire circumstances required that Parliament be as flexible as possible in its ability to respond and that taxation was one of the areas where this flexibility should be available, though rarely used. In any circumstances other than emergencies, however, he argues taxation should be a right practiced in effect by colonial legislatures, such as those that helped govern the thirteen colonies. These suggestions would be adopted as policy by the British Empire many years later, although they were not implemented at the time.
The speech had little immediate effect. As the situation in America worsened, Burke continued to think and speak about the relationship of Britain with her colonies. These culminated with the important speech known as the Speech on Moving Resolutions on Conciliation with America.
A British newspaper cartoon reacting to the repeal of the Stamp Act.
CONTENTS
PREFACE.
SPEECH.
Edmund Burke by James Barry, 1774
PREFACE.
The following speech has been much the subject of conversation, and the desire of having it printed was last summer very general. The means of gratifying the public curiosity were obligingly furnished from the notes of some gentlemen, members of the last Parliament.
This piece has been for some months ready for the press. But a delicacy, possibly over-scrupulous, has delayed the publication to this time. The friends of administration have been used to attribute a great deal of the opposition to their measures in America to the writings published in England. The editor of this speech kept it back, until all the measures of government have had their full operation, and can be no longer affected, if ever they could have been affected, by any publication.
Most readers will recollect the uncommon pains taken at the beginning of the last session of the last Parliament, and indeed during the whole course of it, to asperse the characters and decry the measures of those who were supposed to be friends to America, in order to weaken the effect of their opposition to the acts of rigor then preparing against the colonies. The speech contains a full refutation of the charges against that party with which Mr. Burke has all along acted. In doing this, he has taken a review of the effects of all the schemes which have been successively adopted in the government of the plantations. The subject is interestin
g; the matters of information various and important; and the publication at this time, the editor hopes, will not be thought unseasonable.
SPEECH.
During the last session of the last Parliament, on the 19th of April, 1774, Mr. Rose Fuller, member for Rye, made the following motion: —
“That an act made in the seventh year of the reign of his present Majesty, intituled, ‘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, might be read.”
And the same being read accordingly, he moved, —
“That this House will, upon this day sevennight, resolve itself into a committee of the whole House, to take into consideration the duty of three-pence per pound weight upon tea, payable in all his Majesty’s dominions in America, imposed by the said act; and also the appropriation of the said duty.”
On this latter motion a warm and interesting debate arose, in which Mr. Burke spoke as follows.
Sir, — I agree with the honorable gentleman who spoke last, that this subject is not new in this House. Very disagreeably to this House, very unfortunately to this nation, and to the peace and prosperity of this whole empire, no topic has been more familiar to us. For nine long years, session after session, we have been lashed round and round this miserable circle of occasional arguments and temporary expedients. I am sure our heads must turn and our stomachs nauseate with them. We have had them in every shape; we have looked at them in every point of view. Invention is exhausted; reason is fatigued; experience has given judgment; but obstinacy is not yet conquered.
The honorable gentleman has made one endeavor more to diversify the form of this disgusting argument. He has thrown out a speech composed almost entirely of challenges. Challenges are serious things; and as he is a man of prudence as well as resolution, I dare say he has very well weighed those challenges before he delivered them. I had long the happiness to sit at the same side of the House, and to agree with the honorable gentleman on all the American questions. My sentiments, I am sure, are well known to him; and I thought I had been perfectly acquainted with his. Though I find myself mistaken, he will still permit me to use the privilege of an old friendship; he will permit me to apply myself to the House under the sanction of his authority, and, on the various grounds he has measured out, to submit to you the poor opinions which I have formed upon a matter of importance enough to demand the fullest consideration I could bestow upon it.
He has stated to the House two grounds of deliberation: one narrow and simple, and merely confined to the question on your paper; the other more large and more complicated, — comprehending the whole series of the Parliamentary proceedings with regard to America, their causes, and their consequences. With regard to the latter ground, he states it as useless, and thinks it may be even dangerous, to enter into so extensive a field of inquiry. Yet, to my surprise, he had hardly laid down this restrictive proposition, to which his authority would have given so much weight, when directly, and with the same authority, he condemns it, and declares it absolutely necessary to enter into the most ample historical detail. His zeal has thrown him a little out of his usual accuracy. In this perplexity, what shall we do, Sir, who are willing to submit to the law he gives us? He has reprobated in one part of his speech the rule he had laid down for debate in the other, and, after narrowing the ground for all those who are to speak after him, he takes an excursion, himself, as unbounded as the subject and the extent of his great abilities.
Sir, when I cannot obey all his laws, I will do the best I can. I will endeavor to obey such of them as have the sanction of his example, and to stick to that rule which, though not consistent with the other, is the most rational. He was certainly in the right, when he took the matter largely. I cannot prevail on myself to agree with him in his censure of his own conduct. It is not, he will give me leave to say, either useless or dangerous. He asserts, that retrospect is not wise; and the proper, the only proper subject of inquiry, is “not how we got into this difficulty, but how we are to get out of it.” In other words, we are, according to him, to consult our invention, and to reject our experience. The mode of deliberation he recommends is diametrically opposite to every rule of reason and every principle of good sense established amongst mankind. For that sense and that reason I have always understood absolutely to prescribe, whenever we are involved in difficulties from the measures we have pursued, that we should take a strict review of those measures, in order to correct our errors, if they should be corrigible, — or at least to avoid a dull uniformity in mischief, and the unpitied calamity of being repeatedly caught in the same snare.
Sir, I will freely follow the honorable gentleman in his historical discussion, without the least management for men or measures, further than as they shall seem to me to deserve it. But before I go into that large consideration, because I would omit nothing that can give the House satisfaction, I wish to tread the narrow ground to which alone the honorable gentleman, in one part of his speech, has so strictly confined us.
He desires to know, whether, if we were to repeal this tax, agreeably to the proposition of the honorable gentleman who made the motion, the Americans would not take post on this concession, in order to make a new attack on the next body of taxes; and whether they would not call for a repeal of the duty on wine as loudly as they do now for the repeal of the duty on tea. Sir, I can give no security on this subject. But I will do all that I can, and all that can be fairly demanded. To the experience which the honorable gentleman reprobates in one instant and reverts to in the next, to that experience, without the least wavering or hesitation on my part, I steadily appeal: and would to God there was no other arbiter to decide on the vote with which the House is to conclude this day!
When Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in the year 1766, I affirm, first, that the Americans did not in consequence of this measure call upon you to give up the former Parliamentary revenue which subsisted in that country, or even any one of the articles which compose it. I affirm also, that, when, departing from the maxims of that repeal, you revived the scheme of taxation, and thereby filled the minds of the colonists with new jealousy and all sorts of apprehensions, then it was that they quarrelled with the old taxes as well as the new; then it was, and not till then, that they questioned all the parts of your legislative power, and by the battery of such questions have shaken the solid structure of this empire to its deepest foundations.
Of those two propositions I shall, before I have done, give such convincing, such damning proof, that, however the contrary may be whispered in circles or bawled in newspapers, they never more will dare to raise their voices in this House. I speak with great confidence. I have reason for it. The ministers are with me. They at least are convinced that the repeal of the Stamp Act had not, and that no repeal can have, the consequences which the honorable gentleman who defends their measures is so much alarmed at. To their conduct I refer him for a conclusive answer to his objection. I carry my proof irresistibly into the very body of both Ministry and Parliament: not on any general reasoning growing out of collateral matter, but on the conduct of the honorable gentleman’s ministerial friends on the new revenue itself.
The act of 1767, which grants this tea-duty, sets forth in its preamble, that it was expedient to raise a revenue in America for the support of the civil government there, as well as for purposes still more extensive. To this support the act assigns six branches of duties. About two years after this act passed, the ministry, I mean the present ministry, thought it expedient to repeal five of the duties, and to leave (for reasons best known to themselves) only the sixth standing. Suppose any person, at the time of that repeal, had thus addressed the minister: “Condemning,
as you do, the repeal of the Stamp Act, why do you venture to repeal the duties upon glass, paper, and painters’ colors? Let your pretence for the repeal be what it will, are you not thoroughly convinced that your concessions will produce, not satisfaction, but insolence in the Americans, and that the giving up these taxes will necessitate the giving up of all the rest?” This objection was as palpable then as it is now; and it was as good for preserving the five duties as for retaining the sixth. Besides, the minister will recollect that the repeal of the Stamp Act had but just preceded his repeal; and the ill policy of that measure, (had it been so impolitic as it has been represented,) and the mischiefs it produced, were quite recent. Upon the principles, therefore, of the honorable gentleman, upon the principles of the minister himself, the minister has nothing at all to answer. He stands condemned by himself, and by all his associates old and new, as a destroyer, in the first trust of finance, of the revenues, — and in the first rank of honor, as a betrayer of the dignity of his country.
Most men, especially great men, do not always know their well-wishers. I come to rescue that noble lord out of the hands of those he calls his friends, and even out of his own. I will do him the justice he is denied at home. He has not been this wicked or imprudent man. He knew that a repeal had no tendency to produce the mischiefs which give so much alarm to his honorable friend. His work was not bad in its principle, but imperfect in its execution; and the motion on your paper presses him only to complete a proper plan, which, by some unfortunate and unaccountable error, he had left unfinished.
I hope, Sir, the honorable gentleman who spoke last is thoroughly satisfied, and satisfied out of the proceedings of ministry on their own favorite act, that his fears from a repeal are groundless. If he is not, I leave him, and the noble lord who sits by him, to settle the matter as well as they can together; for, if the repeal of American taxes destroys all our government in America, — he is the man! — and he is the worst of all the repealers, because he is the last.
