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THE LIBRARY
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THE UNIVERSITY
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LOS ANGELES
FROM THE LIBRARY OF
FRANK J. KLINGBERG
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THE
WORKS
OF
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
EDMUND BURKE,
A NEW EDITION.
VOL. VI.
london:
PRINTED FOR C. AND J. RIVINGTON,
ST. PAUL'S CHURCH-YARD;
ANA WATERLOO-PLACE, PALL-MALL.
1826.
Luke Hansard & Sons,
near Lincoln's-lnn Fields, London.
College
Library
PK ,
3324
CONTENTS.
VOL. VI.
LETTER to a Member of the National
Assembly P a g e l
Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs - 69
Letter to a Peer of Ireland on the Penal Laws
against Irish Catholicks - 269
Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, Bart. M. P.
on the Subject of the Roman Catholicks of
Ireland, and the Propriety of admitting them
to the Elective Franchise, consistently with the
Principles of the Constitution, as established
at the Revolution - - -297
A LETTER
MR. BURKE,
A MEMBER
THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY;
IN ANSWER
TO SOME OBJECTIONS TO HIS BOOK
FRENCH AFFAIRS.
1791.
VOL. VI. B
SIR,
HAD the honour to receive your letter of the
17th of November last ; in which, with some
exceptions, you are pleased to consider favourably
the letter I have written on the affairs of France.
I shall ever accept any mark of approbation at-
tended with instruction with more pleasure than
general and unqualified praises. The latter can
serve only to flatter our vanity ; the former, whilst
it encourages us to proceed, may help to improve
us in our progress.
Some of the errours you point out to me in my
printed letter are really such. One only I find to
be material. It is corrected in the edition which
I take the liberty of sending to you. As to the
cavils which may be made on some part of my re-
marks, with regard to the gradations in your new
constitution, you observe justly that they do not
affect the substance of my objections. Whether
there be a round more or less in the ladder of re-
presentation, by which your workmen ascend from
their parochial tyranny to their federal anarchy,
when the whole scale is false, appears to me of little
or no importance.
ii 2 I published
4 LETTER TO A MEMBER
I published my thoughts on that constitution,
that my countrymen might be enabled to estimate
the wisdom of the plans which were held out to
their imitation. I conceived that the true charac-
ter of those plans would be best collected from the
committee appointed to prepare them. I thought
that the scheme of their building would be better
comprehended in the design of the architects than
in the execution of the masons. .It was not worth
my reader's while to occupy himself with the al-
terations by which bungling practice corrects ab-
surd theory. Such an investigation would be end-
less : because every day's past experience of im-
practicability has driven, and every day's future
experience will drive, those men to new devices as
exceptionable as the old ; and which are no other-
wise worthy of observation than as they give a
daily proof of the delusion of their promises, and
the falsehood of their professions. Had I followed
all these changes, my letter would have been only
a gazette of their wanderings ; a journal of their
march from errour to errour, through a dry dreary
desert, unguided by the lights of heaven, or by
the contrivance which wisdom has invented to
supply their place.
I am unalterably persuaded, that the attempt to
oppress, degrade, impoverish, confiscate and ex-
tinguish the original gentlemen, and landed pro-
perty of a whole nation, cannot be justified tinder
any
OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY. 5
any form it may assume. I am satisfied beyond a
doubt, that the project of turning a great empire
into a vestry, or into a collection of vestries, and
of governing it in the spirit of a parochial admi-
nistration, is senseless and absurd, in any mode,
or with any qualifications. I can never be con-
vinced, that the scheme of placing the highest
powers of the state in churchwardens and consta-
bles, and other such officers, guided by the pru-
dence of litigious attornies, and Jew brokers, and
set in action by shameless women of the lowest
condition,, by keepers of hotels, taverns and bro-
thels, by pert apprentices, by clerks, shop-boys,
hair-dressers, fiddlers, and dancers on the stage,
(who, in such a commonwealth as yours, will in
future overbear, as already they have overborne,
the sober incapacity of dull, uninstructed men, of
useful but laborious occupations) can never be put
into any shape, that must not be both disgraceful
and destructive. The whole of this project, even
if it were what it pretends to be, and was not, in
reality, the dominion, through that disgraceful
medium, of half a dozen, or perhaps fewer, intri-
guing politicians, is so mean, so low-minded, so
stupid a contrivance, in point of wisdom, as well
as so perfectly detestable for its wickedness, that I
must always consider the correctives, which might
make it in any degree practicable, to be so many
new objections to it.
In
O LETTER TO A MEMBER
In that wretched state of things, some are afraid
that the authors of your miseries may be led to
precipitate their further designs, by the hints they
may receive from the very arguments used to
expose the absurdity of their system, to mark the
incongruity of its parts, and its inconsistency with
their own principles ; and that your masters may
be led to render their schemes more consistent, by
rendering them more mischievous. Excuse the
liberty which your indulgence authorizes me to
take, when I observe to you, that such apprehen-
sions as these would prevent all exertion of our
faculties in this great cause of mankind.
A rash recourse to force is not to be justified in
a state of real weakness. Such attempts bring on
disgrace ; and, in their failure, discountenance and
discourage more rational endeavours. But reason
is to be hazarded, though it may be perverted by
craft and sophistry ; for reason can suffer no loss
nor shame, nor can it impede any useful plan of
future policy. In the unavoidable uncertainty, as
to the effect, which attends on every measure of
human prudence, nothing seems a surer antidote
to the poison of fraud than its detection. It is
true the fraud may be swallowed after this dis-
covery ; and perhaps even swallowed the more
greedily for being a detected fraud. Men some-
times make a point of honour not to be disabused ;
and they had rather fall into an hundred errours
than
OF fHE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY. 7
than confess one. But after all, when neither
our principles nor our dispositions, nor, perhaps,
our talents, enable us to encounter delusion with
delusion, we must use our best reason to those that
ought to be reasonable creatures, and to take our
chance for the event. We cannot act on these
anomalies in the minds of men. I do not con-
ceive that the persons who have contrived these
things can be made much the better or the worse
for any thing which can be said to them. They
are reason proof. Here and there, some men, who
were at first carried away by wild, good intentions
may be led, when their first fervours are abated,
to join in a sober survey of the schemes into which
they had been deluded. To those only (and I am
sorry to say they are not likely to make a large
description) we apply with any hope. I may speak
it upon an assurance almost approaching to abso-
lute knowledge, that nothing has been done that has
not been contrived from the beginning, even before
the states had assembled. Nulla nova mihi res
inopinave surgit. They are the same men and the
same designs that they were from the first, though
varied in their appearance. It was the very same
animal that at first crawled about in the shape of
a caterpiller, that you now see rise into the air,
and expand his wings to the sun.
Proceeding, therefore, as we are obliged to pro-
ceed, that is upon an hypothesis that we address
rational
8 LETTER TO A MEMBER
rational men, can false political principles be more
effectually exposed, than by demonstrating that
they lead to consequences directly inconsistent
with and subversive of the arrangements grounded
upon them? If this kind of demonstration is not
permitted, the process of reasoning called deductio
ad absurdum, which even the severity of geometry
does not reject, could not be employed at all in
legislative discussions. One of our strongest wea-
pons against folly acting with authority would be
lost.
You know, Sir, that even the virtuous efforts of
your patriots to prevent the ruin of your country
have had this very turn given to them. It has
been said here, and in France too, that the reign-
ing usurpers would not have carried their tyranny
to such destructive lengths, if they had not been
stimulated and provoked to it by the acrimony of
your opposition. There is a dilemma to which
every opposition to successful iniquity must, in the
nature of things, be liable. If you lie still, you
are considered as an accomplice in the measures
in which you silently acquiesce. If you resist, you
are accused of provoking irritable power to new
excesses. The conduct of a losing party never
appears right : at least it never can possess the
only infallible criterion of wisdom to vulgar
judgments success.
The indulgence of a sort of undefined hope, an
obscure
OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY. 9
obscure confidence, that some lurking remains of
virtue, some degree of shame, might exist in the
breasts of the oppressors of France, has been among
the causes which have helped to bring on the com-
mon ruin of king and people. There is no safety
for honest men, but by believing all possible evil
of evil men, and by acting with promptitude, de-
cision and steadiness on that belief. I well re-
member, at every epocha of this wonderful his-
tory, in every scene of this tragick business, that
when your sophistick usurpers were laying down
mischievous principles, and even applying them in
direct resolutions, it was the fashion to say, that
they never intended to execute those declarations
in their rigour. This made men careless in their
opposition, and remiss in early precaution. By
holding out this fallacious hope, the impostors de-
luded sometimes one description of men, and some-
times another, so that no means of resistance were
provided against them, when they came to exe-
cute in cruelty what they had planned in fraud.
There are cases in which a man would be
ashamed not to have been imposed on. There is
a confidence necessary to human intercourse, and
without which men are often more injured by
their own suspicions than they would be by the
perfidy of others. But when men whom we know
to be wicked impose upon us, we are something
worse than dupes. When we know them, their
fair
10 LETTER TO A MEMBER
fair pretences become new motives for distrust.
There is one case indeed, in which it would be
madness not to give the fullest credit to the most
deceitful of men, that is, when they make decla-
rations of hostility against us.
I find that some persons entertain other hopes,
which I confess appear more specious than those
by which at first so many were deluded and dis-
armed. They flatter themselves that the extreme
misery brought upon the people by their folly will
at last open the eyes of the multitude, if not of
their leaders. Much the contrary, I fear. As to
the leaders in this system of imposture, you
know, that cheats and deceivers never can repent.
The fraudulent have no resource but in fraud.
They have no other goods in their magazine.
They have no virtue or wisdom in their minds,
to which, in a disappointment concerning the pro-
fitable effects of fraud and cunning, they can re-
treat. The wearing out of an old serves only to
put them upon the invention of a new delusion.
Unluckily too, the credulity of dupes is as inex-
haustible as the invention of knaves. They never
give people possession ; but they always keep them
in hope. Your state doctors do not so much as
pretend that any good whatsoever has hitherto
been derived from their operations, or that the
publick has prospered in any one instance, under
their management. The nation is sick, very sick,
by
OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY. II
by their medicines. But the charlatan tells them
that what is passed cannot be helped ; they have
taken the draught, and they must wait its opera-
tion with patience ; that the first effects indeed
are unpleasant, but that the very sickness is a proof
that the dose is of no sluggish operation ; that
sickness is inevitable in all constitutional revolu-
tions ; that the body must pass through pain to
ease ; that the prescriber is not an empirick
who proceeds by vulgar experience, but one who
grounds his practice * on the sure rules of art,
which cannot possibly fail. You have read, Sir,
the last manifesto, or mountebank's bill, of the
National Assembly. You see their presumption in
their promises is not lessened by all their failures
in the performance. Compare this last address of
the Assembly and the present state of your affairs
with the early engagements of that body ; engage-
ments which, not content with declaring, they so-
lemnly deposed upon oath ; swearing lustily, that if
they were supported they would make their coun-
try glorious and happy ; and then judge whether
those who can write such things, or those who can
bear to read them, are of themselves to be brought
to any reasonable course of thought or action.
* It is said in the last quackish address of the National As-
sembly to the people of France, that they have not formed their
arrangements upon vulgar practice ; but on a theory which
cannot fail ; or something to that effect.
As
1 LETTER TO A MEMBER
As to the people at large, when once these mi-
serable sheep have broken the fold, and have got
themselves loose, not from the restraint, but from
the protection of all the principles of natural au-
thority and legitimate subordination, they be-
come the natural prey of impostors. When they
have once tasted of the flattery of knaves, they can
no longer endure reason, which appears to them
only in the form of censure and reproach. Great
distress has never hitherto taught, and whilst the
world lasts it never will teach, wise lessons to any
part of mankind. Men are as much blinded by
the extremes of misery as by the extremes of pros-
perity. Desperate situations produce desperate
councils and desperate measures. The people of
France, almost generally, have been taught to look
for other resources than those which can be de-
rived from order, frugality, and industry. They are
generally armed ; and they are made to expect
much from the use of, arms. Nihil non arro-
gant armis. Besides this, the retrograde order of
society has something flattering to the dispositions
of mankind. The life of adventurers, gamesters,
gipsies, beggars, and robbers is not unpleasant.
It requires restraint to keep men from falling into
that habit. The shifting tides of fear and hope,
the flight and pursuit, the peril and escape, the al-
ternate famine and feasts of the savage and the
thief, after a time, render all course of slow, steady,
progressive,
OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY. 13
progressive, unvaried occupation, and the pros-
pect only of a limited mediocrity at the end of
long labour, to the last degree tame, languid, and
insipid. Those who have been once intoxicated
with power, and have derived any kind of emo-
lument from it, even though but for one year,
never can willingly abandon it. They may be
distressed in the midst of all their power ; but they
will never look to any thing but power for their
relief. When did distress ever oblige a prince to
abdicate his authority? And what effect will it
have upon those who are made to believe them-
selves a people of princes ?
The more active and stirring part of the lower
orders having got government, and the distribution
of plunder into their hands, they will use its re-
sources in each municipality to form a body of
adherents. These rulers, and their adherents will
be strong enough to overpower the discontents of
those who have not been able to assert their share
of the spoil. The unfortunate adventurers in the
cheating lottery of plunder will proabbly be the
least sagacious, or the most inactive and irresolute
of the gang. If, on disappointment, they should
dare to stir, they will soon be suppressed as rebels
and mutineers by their brother rebels. Scantily
fed for a while with the offal of plunder, they
will drop off by degrees; they will be driven out
of sight and out of thought ; and they will be
left
14< LETTER TO A MEMBER
left to perish obscurely, like rats, in holes and
corners.
From the forced repentance of invalid muti-
neers and disbanded thieves, you can hope for no
resource. Government itself, which ought to con-
strain the more bold and dextrous of these rob-
bers, is their accomplice. Its arms, its treasures,
its all are in their hands. Judicature, which above
all things should awe them, is their creature and
their instrument. Nothing seems to me to ren-
der your internal situation more desperate than
this one circumstance of the state of your judi-
cature. Many days are not passed since we have
seen a set of men brought forth by your rulers for
a most critical function. Your rulers brought
forth a set of men, steaming from the sweat and
drudgery, and all black with the smoke and soot
of the forge of confiscation and robbery ardentis
masses fuligine lippos, a set of men brought forth
from the trade of hammering arms of proof, of-
fensive and defensive, in aid of the enterprises,
and for the subsequent protection of housebreak-
ers, murderers, traitors, and malefactors ; men,
who had their minds seasoned with theories per-
fectly conformable to their practice, and who had
always laughed at possession and prescription, and
defied all the fundamental maxims of jurispru-
dence. To the horrour and stupefaction of all the
honest part of this nation, and indeed of all nations
who
OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY. 15
who are spectators, we have seen, on the credit of
those very practices and principles, and to carry
them further into effect, these very men placed
on the sacred seat of justice in the capital city of
your late kingdom. We see that in future you
are to be destroyed with more form and regula-
rity. This is not peace ; it is only the introduc-
tion of a sort of discipline in their hostility. Their
tyranny is complete in their justice; and their
lanterne is not half so dreadful as their court.
One would think that out of common decency
they would have given you men who had not
been in the habit of trampling upon law and jus-
tice in the Assembly, neutral men, or men appa-
rently neutral, for judges, who are to dispose of
your lives and fortunes.
Cromwell, when he attempted to legalize his
power, and to settle his conquered country in a
state of order, did not look for dispensers of justice
in the instruments of his usurpation. Quite the
contrary. He sought out, with great solicitude
and selection, and even from the party most oppo-
site to his designs, men of weight and decorum of
character ; men unstained with the violence of the
times, and with hands not fouled with confisca-
tion and sacrilege : for he chose an Hale for his
chief justice, though he absolutely refused to take
his civick oaths, or to make any acknowledgment
whatsoever of the legality of his government.
Cromwell
16 LETTER TO A MEMBER
Cromwell told this great lawyer, that since he did
not approve his title, all he required of him was*
to administer, in a manner agreeable to his pure
sentiments and unspotted character, that justice
without which human society cannot subsist : that
it was not his particular government, but civil or-
der itself, which, as a judge, he wished him to sup-
port. Cromwell knew how to separate the insti-
tutions expedient to his usurpation from the ad-
ministration of the publick justice of his country.
For Cromwell was a man in whom ambition had
not wholly suppressed, but only suspended the
sentiments of religion, and the love (as far as it
could consist with his designs) of fair and honour-
able reputation. Accordingly, we are indebted
to this act of his for the preservation of our laws,
which some senseless assertors of the rights of men
were then on the point of entirely erasing, as
relicks of feudality and barbarism. Besides, he
gave in the appointment of that man, to that age,
and to all posterity the most brilliant example of
sincere and fervent piety, exact justice, and pro-
found jurisprudence*. But these are not the
things in which your philosophick usurpers choose
to follow Cromwell.
One would think, that after an honest and
necessary revolution (if they had a mind that
theirs should pass for such) your masters would
* See Burnet's Life of Hale.
have
OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY. 17
have imitated the virtuous policy of those who
have been at the head of revolutions of that glo-
rious character. Burnet tells us, that nothing
tended to reconcile the English nation to the go-
vernment of King William so much as the care he
took to fill the vacant bishopricks with men who
had attracted the public esteem by their learning,
eloquence, and piety, and, above all, by their
known moderation in the state. With you, in
your purifying revolution, whom have you cho-
sen to regulate the church ? Mr. Mirabeau is a
fine speaker and a fine writer, and a fine a
very fine man; but really nothing gave more
surprise to every body here, than to find him the
supreme head of your ecclesiastical affairs. The
rest is of course. Your Assembly addresses a
manifesto to France, in which they tell the people,
with an insulting irony, that they have brought
the church to its primitive condition. In one re-
spect their declaration is undoubtedly true; for
they have brought it to a state of poverty and
persecution. What can be hoped for after this ?
Have not men, (if they deserve the name) under
this new hope and head of- the church, been made
bishops for no other merit than having acted as
instruments of atheists; for no other merit than
having thrown the children's bread to dogs ; and
in order to gorge the whole gang of usurers, ped-
lars, and itinerant Jew-discounters at the corners
VOL. vi. C of
18 LETTER TO A MEMBER
of streets, starved the poor of their Christian
flocks, and their own brother pastors ? Have not
such men been made bishops to administer in
temples, in which (if the patriotick donations have
not already stripped them of their vessels) the
churchwardens ought to take security for the al-
tar plate, and not so much as to trust the chalice
in their sacrilegious hands, so long as Jews have
assignats on ecclesiastick plunder, to exchange for
the silver stolen from churches ?
I am told, that the very sons of such Jew-jobbers
have been made bishops ; persons not to be sus-
pected of any sort of Christian superstition, fit col-
leagues to the holy prelate of Autun, and bred
at the feet of that Gamaliel. We know who it
was that drove the money-changers out of the
temple. We see too who it is that brings them
in again. We have in London very respectable
persons of the Jewish nation, whom we will keep ;
but we have of the same tribe others of a very
different description, housebreakers, and receiv-
ers of stolen goods, and forgers of paper currency,
more than we can conveniently hang. These we
can spare to France, to fill the new episcopal
thrones : men well versed in swearing ; and who
will scruple no oath which the fertile genius pf
any of your reformers can devise.
In matters so ridiculous, it is hard to be grave.
On a view of their consequences, it is almost
inhuman
OF THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY. 19
inhuman to treat them lightly. To what a state
of savage, stupid, servile insensibility must your
people be reduced, who can endure such proceed-
ings in their church, their state, and their judica-
ture, even for a moment! But the deluded people
of France are like other madmen, who, to a mi-
racle, bear hunger, and thirst, and cold, and con-
finement, and the chains and lash of their keeper,
whilst all the while they support themselves by the
imagination that they are generals of armies, pro-
phets, kings, and emperours. As to a change of
mind in these men, who consider infamy as ho-
nour, degradation as preferment, bondage to low