conveniences and miseries of anarchy may bring people to their senses... I am far from bearing any ill-will to the Americans; they are a very good people, and I have long known them. I began life with them, and owe much to them, having been much concerned in the plantation causes before the Privy Council; and so I became a good deal acquainted with American affairs and people. I dare say their heat will soon be over, when they come to feel a little the consequences of their opposition to the Legislature. Anarchy always cures itself; but the ferment will continue so much the longer while hotheaded men there find that there are persons of weight and character to support and justify them here. Indeed, if the disturbances should continue for a great length of time, force must be the consequence, an application adequate to the mischief and arising out of the necessity of the case; for force is only the difference between a superior and subordinate jurisdiction. In the former the whole force of the Legislature resides collectively, and when it ceases to reside the whole connection is dissolved. It will, indeed, be to very little purpose that we sit here enacting laws and making resolutions, if the inferior will not obey them, or if we neither can nor dare enforce them; for then and then, I say, of necessity - the matter comes to the sword. If the offspring are grown too big and too resolute to obey the parent, you must try which is the strongest, and exert all the powers of the mother country to decide the contest. I am satisfied, notwithstanding, that time, and a wise and steady conduct, may prevent those extremities which would be fatal to both. I remember well when it was the violent humour of the times to decry standing armies and garrisons as dangerous and incompatible with the liberty of the subject. Nothing would do but a regular militia. The militia are embodied; they march; and no sooner was the militia law thus put into execution, but it was then said to be an intolerable burden upon the subject, and that it would fall, sooner or later, into the hands of the Crown. That was the language, and many counties petitioned against it. This may be the case with the colonies. In many places they begin already to feel the effects of their resistance to government. Interest very soon divides mercantile people; and, although there may be some mad, enthusiastic, or ill-designing people in the colonies, yet I am convinced that the greatest bulk, who have understanding and property, are still well affected to the mother country. You have, my Lords, many friends still in the colonies; and take care that you do not, by abdicating your own authority, desert them and yourselves, and lose them forever... But, my Lords, I shall make this application of it. You may abdicate your right over the colonies. Take care, my Lords, how you do so; for such an act will be irrevocable. Proceed, then, my Lords, with spirit and firmness; and when you shall have established your authority, it will then be a time to show your lenity. The Americans, as I said before, are a very good people, and I wish them exceedingly well; but they are heated and inflamed. The noble Lord who spoke before ended with a prayer. I cannot end better than by saying to it, Amen; and in the words of Maurice, Prince of Orange, concerning the Hollanders, "God bless this industrious, frugal, and well-meaning, but easily deluded people!" (British Orations, ed. cit., I, 161.) 205. The Character of the Colonists Burke The great Irish orator, Edmund Burke, was a warm advocate of the American cause. In his most noted speech on the subject, he voiced the opinion general in England, though not in Parliament, that the love of liberty would call the colonists to great deeds if they were driven to desperation. His words form a just and comprehensive summing-up of the judgment of the most intelligent Englishmen of that day. But there is still behind a third consideration concerning this object, which serves to determine my opinion on the sort of policy which ought to be pursued in the management of America, even more than its population and its commerceI mean its character and temper. In this character of the Americans a love of freedom is the predominating feature, which marks and distinguishes the whole; and, as an ardent is always a jealous affection, your colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable, whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies, probably, than in any other people of the earth; and this from a variety of powerful causes, which, to understand the true temper of their minds and the direction which this spirit takes, it will not be amiss to lay open somewhat more largely. First, the people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen. England, sir, is a nation which still, I hope, respects, and formerly adored, her freedom. The colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your hands. They are, therefore, not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and on English principles. Abstract liberty, like many other abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favourite point which, by way of eminence, becomes the criterion of their happiness. It happened, you know, sir, that the great contests for freedom in this country were from the earliest times chiefly upon the question of taxation. Most of the contests in the ancient commonwealths turned primarily on the right of election of magistrates, or on the balance among the several orders of the State. The question of money was not with them so immediate. But in England it was otherwise. On this point of taxes the ablest pens and most eloquent tongues have been exercised, the greatest spirits have acted and suffered. In order to give the fullest satisfaction concerning the importance of this point, it was not only necessary for those who in argument defended the excellence of the English Constitution to insist on this privilege of granting money as a dry point of fact, and to prove that the right had been acknowledged in ancient parchments and blind usages to reside in a certain body called the House of Commons; they went much further. They attempted to prove and they succeeded that in theory it ought to be so, from the particular nature of a House of Commons as an immediate representative of the people, whether the old records had delivered this oracle or not. They took infinite pains to inculcate, as a fundamental principle, that in all monarchies the people must in effect themselves, mediately or immediately, possess the power of granting their own money, or no shadow of liberty could subsist. The colonies draw from you, as with their life-blood, those ideas and principles. Their love of liberty, as with you, fixed and attached on this specific point of taxing. Liberty might be safe or might be endangered in twenty other particulars, without their being much pleased or alarmed. Here they felt its pulse; and as they found that beat, they thought themselves sick or sound. I do not say whether they were right or wrong in applying your general arguments to their own case. It is not easy, indeed, to make a monopoly of theorems and corollaries. The fact is that they did thus apply those general arguments; and your mode of governing them, whether through lenity or indolence, through wisdom or mistake, confirmed them in the imagination that they, as well as you, had an interest in these common principles. They were further confirmed in these pleasing errors by the form of their provincial legislative assemblies. Their governments are popular to a high degree; some are merely popular; in all, the popular representative is the most weighty; and this share of the people in their ordinary government never fails to inspire them with lofty sentiments and with a strong aversion from whatever tends to deprive.them of their chief importance... Sir, I can perceive from their manner that some gentlemen object to the latitude of this description, because in the southern colonies the Church of England forms a large body and has a regular establishment. It is certainly true. There is, however, a circumstance attending these colonies which, in my opinion, fully counterbalances this difference and makes the spirit of liberty still more high and haughty than in those to the northward. It is that in Virginia and the Carolinas they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this is the case in any part of the world, those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege. Not seeing there that freedom, as in countries where it is a common blessing and as broad and general as the air, may be united with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude, liberty looks, among them, like something that is more noble and liberal. I do not mean, sir, to commend the superior morality of this sentiment, which has at least as much pride as virtue in it; but I cannot alter the nature of man. The fact is so; and these people of the southern colonies are much more strongly, and with a higher and more stubborn spirit, attached to liberty than those to the northward. Such were all the ancient commonwealths; such were our Gothic ancestors; such, in our days, were the Poles; and such will be all masters of slaves who are not slaves themselves. In such a people the haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible. (British Orations, ed. cit., I, 210. CHAPTER XXIX UNION BETWEEN GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND 206. The Union Advocated Castlereagh The influence of Lord Castlereagh had much to do with effecting the union. Castlereagh and Flood were probably the best hated men in Ireland, being looked upon as traitors, but they exercised a power which was undiminished by any personal scruples. That their cause prevailed was owing neither to its popularity nor its justice, but to the methods employed by its advocates and the English Government. It is said, that an union will reduce Ireland to the abject state of a colony. Is it by making her a constituent part of the greatest and first empire in the world? For my part, if I were to describe a colony, I should picture a country in a situation somewhat similar to the present state of Ireland. I should describe a country, whose crown was dependent on that of another country, enjoying a local legislature, but without any power intrusted to that legislature of regulating the succession of that crown. I should describe it as having an executive power administered by the orders of a nonresident minister, irresponsible to the colony for his acts or his advice; I should describe it as incapable of passing the most insignificant law without the licence of the minister of another country; I should describe it as a country unknown to foreign nations in the quality of an independent state, and as subject to another power with regard to all the questions which concern alliances, the declaration and conduct of war, or the negotiations for peace. Another objection has been started, that an imperial parliament cannot be possessed of such local knowledge of the kingdom as is necessary for the due encouragement of its interests. But I ask, what is there to prevent the representatives of Ireland from carrying with them to the imperial parliament all their local knowledge of the wants and interests of Ireland? And what is there to prevent an imperial |