by Edmund Burke
Let us form a supposition, (no foolish or ungrounded supposition,) that, in an age when men are infinitely more disposed to heat themselves with political than religious controversies, the former should entirely prevail, as we see that in some places they have prevailed, over the latter, — and that the Catholics of Ireland, from the courtship paid them on the one hand, and the high tone of refusal on the other, should, in order to enter into all the rights of subjects, all become Protestant Dissenters, and, as the others do, take all your oaths. They would all obtain their civil objects; and the change, for anything I know to the contrary, (in the dark as I am about the Protestant Dissenting tenets,) might be of use to the health of their souls. But what security our Constitution, in Church or State, could derive from that event, I cannot possibly discern. Depend upon it, it is as true as Nature is true, that, if you force them out of the religion of habit, education, or opinion, it is not to yours they will ever go. Shaken in their minds, they will go to that where the dogmas are fewest, — where they are the most uncertain, — where they lead them the least to a consideration of what they have abandoned. They will go to that uniformly democratic system to whose first movements they owed their emancipation. I recommend you seriously to turn this in your mind. Believe that it requires your best and maturest thoughts. Take what course you please, — union or no union; whether the people remain Catholics or become Protestant Dissenters, sure it is that the present state of monopoly cannot continue.
If England were animated, as I think she is not, with her former spirit of domination, and with the strong theological hatred which she once cherished for that description of her fellow-Christians and fellow-subjects, I am yet convinced, that, after the fullest success in a ruinous struggle, you would be obliged to abandon that monopoly. We were obliged to do this, even when everything promised success, in the American business. If you should make this experiment at last, under the pressure of any necessity, you never can do it well. But if, instead of falling into a passion, the leading gentlemen of the country themselves should undertake the business cheerfully, and with hearty affection towards it, great advantages would follow. What is forced cannot be modified: but here you may measure your concessions.
It is a consideration of great moment, that you make the desired admission without altering the system of your representation in the smallest degree or in any part. You may leave that deliberation of a Parliamentary change or reform, if ever you should think fit to engage in it, uncomplicated and unembarrassed with the other question. Whereas, if they are mixed and confounded, as some people attempt to mix and confound them, no one can answer for the effects on the Constitution itself.
There is another advantage in taking up this business singly and by an arrangement for the single object. It is that you may proceed by degrees. We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of Nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation. All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees. This has all the benefits which may be in change, without any of the inconveniences of mutation. Everything is provided for as it arrives. This mode will, on the one hand, prevent the unfixing old interests at once: a thing which is apt to breed a black and sullen discontent in those who are at once dispossessed of all their influence and consideration. This gradual course, on the other side, will prevent men long under depression from being intoxicated with a large draught of new power, which they always abuse with a licentious insolence. But, wishing, as I do, the change to be gradual and cautious, I would, in my first steps, lean rather to the side of enlargement than restriction.
It is one excellence of our Constitution, that all our rights of provincial election regard rather property than person. It is another, that the rights which approach more nearly to the personal are most of them corporate, and suppose a restrained and strict education of seven years in some useful occupation. In both cases the practice may have slid from the principle. The standard of qualification in both cases may be so low, or not so judiciously chosen, as in some degree to frustrate the end. But all this is for your prudence in the case before you. You may rise a step or two the qualification of the Catholic voters. But if you were to-morrow to put the Catholic freeholder on the footing of the most favored forty-shilling Protestant Dissenter, you know, that, such is the actual state of Ireland, this would not make a sensible alteration in almost any one election in the kingdom. The effect in their favor, even defensively, would be infinitely slow. But it would be healing; it would be satisfactory and protecting. The stigma would be removed. By admitting settled, permanent substance in lieu of the numbers, you would avoid the great danger of our time, that of setting up number against property. The numbers ought never to be neglected, because (besides what is due to them as men) collectively, though not individually, they have great property: they ought to have, therefore, protection; they ought to have security; they ought to have even consideration: but they ought not to predominate.
My dear Sir, I have nearly done. I meant to write you a long letter: I have written a long dissertation. I might have done it earlier and better. I might have been more forcible and more clear, if I had not been interrupted as I have been; and this obliges me not to write to you in my own hand. Though my hand but signs it, my heart goes with what I have written. Since I could think at all, those have been my thoughts. You know that thirty-two years ago they were as fully matured in my mind as they are now. A letter of mine to Lord Kenmare, though not by my desire, and full of lesser mistakes, has been printed in Dublin. It was written ten or twelve years ago, at the time when I began the employment, which I have not yet finished, in favor of another distressed people, injured by those who have vanquished them, or stolen a dominion over them. It contained my sentiments then: you will see how far they accord with my sentiments now. Time has more and more confirmed me in them all. The present circumstances fix them deeper in my mind.
I voted last session, if a particular vote could be distinguished in unanimity, for an establishment of the Church of England conjointly with the establishment, which was made some years before by act of Parliament, of the Roman Catholic, in the French conquered country of Canada. At the time of making this English ecclesiastical establishment, we did not think it necessary for its safety to destroy the former Gallican Church settlement. In our first act we settled a government altogether monarchical, or nearly so. In that system, the Canadian Catholics were far from being deprived of the advantages or distinctions, of any kind, which they enjoyed under their former monarchy. It is true that some people, and amongst them one eminent divine, predicted at that time that by this step we should lose our dominions in America. He foretold that the Pope would send his indulgences hither; that the Canadians would fall in with France, would declare independence, and draw or force our colonies into the same design. The independence happened according to his prediction; but in directly the reverse order. All our English Protestant colonies revolted. They joined themselves to France; and it so happened that Popish Canada was the only place which preserved its fidelity, the only place in which France got no footing, the only peopled colony which now remains to Great Britain. Vain are all the prognostics taken from ideas and passions, which survive the state of things which gave rise to them. When last year we gave a popular representation to the same Canada by the choice of the landholders, and an aristocratic representation at the choice of the crown, neither was the choice of the crown nor the election of the landholders limited by a consideration of religion. We had no dread for the Protestant Church which we settled there, because we permitted the French Catholics, in the utmost latitude of the description, to be free subjects. They are good subjects, I have no doubt; but I will not allow that any French Canadian Catholics are better men or better citizens than the Irish of the same communion. Passing from the extremity of the West to the extremity almost of the East, I have been many years (now entering into the twelfth) employed in supporting the rights, pri
vileges, laws, and immunities of a very remote people. I have not as yet been able to finish my task. I have struggled through much discouragement and much opposition, much obloquy, much calumny, for a people with whom I have no tie but the common bond of mankind. In this I have not been left alone. We did not fly from our undertaking because the people are Mahometans or Pagans, and that a great majority of the Christians amongst them are Papists. Some gentlemen in Ireland, I dare say, have good reasons for what they may do, which do not occur to me. I do not presume to condemn them; but, thinking and acting as I have done towards those remote nations, I should not know how to show my face, here or in Ireland, if I should say that all the Pagans, all the Mussulmen, and even all the Papists, (since they must form the highest stage in the climax of evil,) are worthy of a liberal and honorable condition, except those of one of the descriptions, which forms the majority of the inhabitants of the country in which you and I were born. If such are the Catholics of Ireland, ill-natured and unjust people, from our own data, may be inclined not to think better of the Protestants of a soil which is supposed to infuse into its sects a kind of venom unknown in other places.
You hated the old system as early as I did. Your first juvenile lance was broken against that giant. I think you were even the first who attacked the grim phantom. You have an exceedingly good understanding, very good humor, and the best heart in the world. The dictates of that temper and that heart, as well as the policy pointed out by that understanding, led you to abhor the old code. You abhorred it, as I did, for its vicious perfection. For I must do it justice: it was a complete system, full of coherence and consistency, well digested and well composed in all its parts. It was a machine of wise and elaborate contrivance, and as well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment, and degradation of a people, and the debasement, in them, of human nature itself, as ever proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man. It is a thing humiliating enough, that we are doubtful of the effect of the medicines we compound, — we are sure of our poisons. My opinion ever was, (in which I heartily agree with those that admired the old code,) that it was so constructed, that, if there was once a breach in any essential part of it, the ruin of the whole, or nearly of the whole, was, at some time or other, a certainty. For that reason I honor and shall forever honor and love you, and those who first caused it to stagger, crack, and gape. Others may finish; the beginners have the glory; and, take what part you please at this hour, (I think you will take the best,) your first services will never be forgotten by a grateful country. Adieu! Present my best regards to those I know, — and as many as I know in our country I honor. There never was so much ability, nor, I believe, virtue in it. They have a task worthy of both. I doubt not they will perform it, for the stability of the Church and State, and for the union and the separation of the people: for the union of the honest and peaceable of all sects; for their separation from all that is ill-intentioned and seditious in any of them.
BEACONSFIELD, JANUARY 3, 1792.
A LETTER TO WILLIAM ELLIOT, ESQ., OCCASIONED BY THE ACCOUNT GIVEN IN A NEWSPAPER OF THE SPEECH MADE IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS BY THE * * * * OF * * * * * * * IN THE DEBATE CONCERNING LORD FITZWILLIAM. 1795.
BEACONSFIELD, May 28,1795.
My dear sir, — I have been told of the voluntary which, for the entertainment of the House of Lords, has been lately played by his Grace the * * * * of * * * * * * *, a great deal at my expense, and a little at his own. I confess I should have liked the composition rather better, if it had been quite new. But every man has his taste, and his Grace is an admirer of ancient music.
There may be sometimes too much even of a good thing. A toast is good, and a bumper is not bad: but the best toasts may be so often repeated as to disgust the palate, and ceaseless rounds of bumpers may nauseate and overload the stomach. The ears of the most steady-voting politicians may at last be stunned with “three times three.” I am sure I have been very grateful for the flattering remembrance made of me in the toasts of the Revolution Society, and of other clubs formed on the same laudable plan. After giving the brimming honors to Citizen Thomas Paine and to Citizen Dr. Priestley, the gentlemen of these clubs seldom failed to bring me forth in my turn, and to drink, “Mr. Burke, and thanks to him for the discussion he has provoked.”
I found myself elevated with this honor; for, even by the collision of resistance, to be the means of striking out sparkles of truth, if not merit, is at least felicity.
Here I might have rested. But when I found that the great advocate, Mr. Erskine, condescended to resort to these bumper toasts, as the pure and exuberant fountains of politics and of rhetoric, (as I hear he did, in three or four speeches made in defence of certain worthy citizens,) I was rather let down a little. Though still somewhat proud of myself, I was not quite so proud of my voucher. Though he is no idolater of fame, in some way or other Mr. Erskine will always do himself honor. Methinks, however, in following the precedents of these toasts, he seemed to do more credit to his diligence as a special pleader than to his invention as an orator. To those who did not know the abundance of his resources, both of genius and erudition, there was something in it that indicated the want of a good assortment, with regard to richness and variety, in the magazine of topics and commonplaces which I suppose he keeps by him, in imitation of Cicero and other renowned declaimers of antiquity.
Mr. Erskine supplied something, I allow, from the stores of his imagination, in metamorphosing the jovial toasts of clubs into solemn special arguments at the bar. So far the thing showed talent: however, I must still prefer the bar of the tavern to the other bar. The toasts at the first hand were better than the arguments at the second. Even when the toasts began to grow old as sarcasms, they were washed down with still older pricked election Port; then the acid of the wine made some amends for the want of anything piquant in the wit. But when his Grace gave them a second transformation, and brought out the vapid stuff which had wearied the clubs and disgusted the courts, the drug made up of the bottoms of rejected bottles, all smelling so wofully of the cork and of the cask, and of everything except the honest old lamp, and when that sad draught had been farther infected with the jail pollution of the Old Bailey, and was dashed and brewed and ineffectually stummed again into a senatorial exordium in the House of Lords, I found all the high flavor and mantling of my honors tasteless, flat, and stale. Unluckily, the new tax on wine is felt even in the greatest fortunes, and his Grace submits to take up with the heel-taps of Mr. Erskine.
I have had the ill or good fortune to provoke two great men of this age to the publication of their opinions: I mean Citizen Thomas Paine, and his Grace the * * * * of * * * * * * *. I am not so great a leveller as to put these two great men on a par, either in the state, or the republic of letters; but “the field of glory is a field for all.” It is a large one, indeed; and we all may run, God knows where, in chase of glory, over the boundless expanse of that wild heath whose horizon always flies before us. I assure his Grace, (if he will yet give me leave to call him so,) whatever may be said on the authority of the clubs or of the bar, that Citizen Paine (who, they will have it, hunts with me in couples, and who only moves as I drag him along) has a sufficient activity in his own native benevolence to dispose and enable him to take the lead for himself. He is ready to blaspheme his God, to insult his king, and to libel the Constitution of his country, without any provocation from me or any encouragement from his Grace. I assure him that I shall not be guilty of the injustice of charging Mr. Paine’s next work against religion and human society upon his Grace’s excellent speech in the House of Lords. I farther assure this noble Duke that I neither encouraged nor provoked that worthy citizen to seek for plenty, liberty, safety, justice, or lenity, in the famine, in the prisons, in the decrees of Convention, in the revolutionary tribunal, and in the guillotine of Paris, rather than quietly to take up with what he could find in the glutted markets, the unbarricadoed streets, the drowsy Old Bailey judges, or, at worst, the airy, wholesome pillory of Old England. The choi
ce of country was his own taste. The writings were the effects of his own zeal. In spite of his friend Dr. Priestley, he was a free agent. I admit, indeed, that my praises of the British government, loaded with all its incumbrances, clogged with its peers and its beef, its parsons and its pudding, its commons and its beer, and its dull slavish liberty of going about just as one pleases, had something to provoke a jockey of Norfolk, who was inspired with the resolute ambition of becoming a citizen of France, to do something which might render him worthy of naturalization in that grand asylum of persecuted merit, something which should entitle him to a place in the senate of the adoptive country of all the gallant, generous, and humane. This, I say, was possible. But the truth is, (with great deference to his Grace I say it,) Citizen Paine acted without any provocation at all; he acted solely from the native impulses of his own excellent heart.
