My lords, no time should be lost which may promise to improve this disposition in America, unless, by an obstinacy founded in madness, we wish to stifle those embers of affection which, after all our savage treatment, do not seem as yet to be entirely extinguished. While, on one side, we must lament the unhappy fate of that spirited officer Mr. Burgoyne, and the gallant troops under his command, who were sacrificed to the wanton temerity. and ignorance of ministers, we are as strongly impelled, on the other, to admire and applaud the generous and magnanimous conduct, the noble friendship, brotherly affection, and humanity, of the victors, who, condescending to impute the horrid orders of massacre and devastation to their true authors, supposed that, as soldiers and Englishmen, those cruel excesses could not have originated with the general, nor were consonant to the brave and humane spirit of a British soldier, if not compelled to it as an act of duty. They traced the first cause of those diabolical orders to their source; and, by that wise and generous interpretation, granted their professed destroyers terms of capitulation, which they could be only entitled to as the makers of fair and honorable war.

My lords, I should not have presumed to trouble you, if the tremendous state of this nation did not, in my opinion, make it necessary. Whether or not the day of retribution is at hand, when the vengeance of a much-injured and afflicted people will fall heavily on the authors of their ruin, I am strongly inclined to believe, that before the day to which the proposed adjournment shall arrive, the noble earl who moved it will have just cause to repent of his motion.

LORD CHATHAM.

VII. RIGHT OF AMERICAN TAXATION.

THE colonies complain that they have not the characteristic mark and seal of British freedom. They complain that they are taxed in a Parliament in which they are not represented. Sir, I am resolved this day to have nothing to do with the question of the right of taxation. I do not examine whether the giving away a man's money be a power excepted and reserved out of the general trust of government; or whether, on the contrary, a right of taxation is necessarily involved in the general principle of legislation, and inseparable from the ordinary supreme power. These are deep questions, where great names militate against each other; where reason is perplexed, and an appeal to authorities only thickens the confusion. For high and reverend authorities lift up their heads on both sides; and there is no sure footing

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in the middle. This point is the "great Serbonian bog, betwixt Damiata and Mount Casius old, where armies whole have sunk." I do not intend to be overwhelmed in that bog, though in such respectable company.

The question with me is, not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do, but what humanity, reason, and justice, tell me I ought to do. Is a politic act the worse for being a generous one? Is no concession proper, but that which is made from your want of right. to keep what you grant? Or does it lessen the grace or dignity of relaxing in the exercise of an odious claim, because you have your evidence-room full of titles, and your magazines stuffed with arms to enforce them? What signify all those titles, and all those arms? Of what avail are they, when the reason of the thing tells me that the assertion of my title is the loss of my suit, and that I could do nothing but wound myself by the use of my own weapons?

I am not determining a point of law; I am restoring tranquillity. And the general character and situation of a people must determine what sort of government is fitted for them. That point nothing else can or ought to determine. My idea, therefore, without considering whether we yield as matter of right, or grant as matter of favor, is to admit the people of our American colonies into an interest in the constitution; and, by recording that admission in the journals of Parliament, to give them as strong an assurance as the nature of the thing will admit, that we mean for ever to adhere to that solemn declaration of systematic indulgence.

BURKE.

VIII. - ENGLISH LIBERTY IN AMERICA.

AMERICA, gentlemen say, is a noble object; it is an object well worth fighting for. Certainly it is, if fighting a people be the best way of gaining them. But, sir, in the 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 colonists, probably, than in any other people of the earth; and this from a great variety of powerful

causes.

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 other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and you know, sir, that the great contests for freedom in this country were, from the carliest times, chiefly upon the question of taxing; maintaining that the people must in effect possess the power of granting their own money, or no shadow of liberty could subsist.

The American colonists draw from you, as with their lifeblood, these ideas and principles. Their love of liberty, as with you, fixed 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.

The temper and character which prevail in our colonies are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human art. We can not, I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates. The language in which they would hear you tell them this tale would detect the imposition; your speech would betray you. An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery.

IB.

IX. THE LABORING POOR.

THE gentleman has spoken of "the laboring poor." Sir, the laboring people are poor only because they are numerous. Numbers, in their nature, imply poverty. In a fair distribution among a vast multitude, none can have much. That class called the rich is so extremely small, that if all their throats were cut, and a distribution made of all that they consume in a year, it would not give a bit of bread and cheese for one night's supper to those who labor.

The vigorous and laborious class have lately got from the bon ton of the humanity of this day this name of the "laboring poor." We have heard many plans for the relief of the "laboring poor." This puling jargon is not as innocent as it is foolish. In meddling

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with great affairs, weakness is ever innoxious. Hitherto the name of poor, in the sense in which it is used to excite compassion, has not been used for those who can, but for those who can' not labor; for the sick and infirm, for orphan infancy, for languishing and decrepit age. But when we affect to pity as poor those who must labor, or the world can not exist, we are trifling with the condition of mankind.

Sir, it is the common doom of man, that he must eat his bread by the sweat of his brow, that is, by the sweat of his body, or the sweat of his mind. If this toil was inflicted as a curse, it is, as might be expected from the Father of all blessings,it is tempered with many alleviations, many comforts. Every attempt to fly from it, and to refuse the very terms of our existence, becomes much more truly a curse; and heavier pains and penalties fall upon those who would elude the tasks which are put upon them by the great Master of the world.

Sir, I do not call a healthy young man, cheerful in mind, and vigorous in his arms, I can not call such a man poor. I can not pity my kind, as a kind, merely because they are men. This affected pity only tends to dissatisfy them with their condition, and to teach them to seek resources where no resources are to be found, in something else than their own industry, frugality, and sobriety.

IB.

X. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

You will remember, gentlemen, that in the beginning of the American war (that era of calamity, disgrace, and downfall an era which no feeling mind will ever mention without a tear for England) you were greatly divided. A very strong body, if not the strongest, opposed itself to the madness which every art and every power were employed to render popular. This opposition continued till after our great but most unfortunate victory on Long Island.* Then all the mounds and banks of our constancy were borne down at once, and the frenzy of the American war broke in upon us like a deluge. This victory, which seemed to put an immediate end to all difficulties, perfected us in that spirit of domination which our unparalleled prosperity had but too long nurtured. Our headlong desires became our politics and our morals. All men who wished for peace, or retained any sentiments of moderation, were overborne or silenced. But time

*In August, 1776, the British followed up their success by the occupation of New York.

at length has made us all of one opinion; and we have all opened our eyes on the true nature of the American war- of all its successes and all its failures.

Do you remember our commission? We sent out a solemn embassy across the Atlantic Ocean, to lay the Crown, the Peerage, the Commons of Great Britain, at the feet of the American Congress. My Lord Carlisle, once the mover of a haughty address against America, was put in the front of this Embassy of Submission. Mr. Eden was taken from the office of Lord Suffolk, to whom he was then Under-Secretary of State; from the office of that Lord Suffolk who, but a few weeks before, in his place in Parliament, did not deign to inquire where "a congress of va grants" was to be found. This Lord Suffolk sent Mr. Eden to find these "vagrants," without knowing where his majesty's generals were to be found, who were joined in the same commission of supplicating those whom they were sent out to subdue.

They enter the capital of America only to abandon it; and these assertors and representatives of the dignity of England, at the tail of a flying army, let fly their Parthian shafts of memorials and remonstrances at random behind them. Their promises and their offers, their flatteries and their menaces, were all despised; and we were saved the disgrace of their formal reception, only because the American Congress scorned to receive them; whilst the state-house of independent Philadelphia opened her doors to the public entry of the ambassador of France. From war and blood we went to submission, and from submission plunged back again to war and blood, to desolate and be desolated, without measure, hope, or end! I am a royalist-I blushed for this degradation of the Crown. I am a Whig-I blushed for the dishonor of Parliament. I am a true EnglishI felt to the quick for the disgrace of England. I am a man I felt for the melancholy reverse of human affairs in the fall of the first power in the world.

man

XI. - ON THE EXPULSION OF WILKES, 1763.

IB.

MY LORDS, let us be cautious how we admit an idea that our rights stand on a footing different from those of the people. Let us be cautious how we invade the liberties of our fellow-subjects, however mean, however remote; for, be assured, my lords, that in whatever part of the empire you suffer slavery to be established, whether it be in America or in Ireland, or here at home, you will find it a disease which spreads by contact, and soon reaches from the extremities to the heart. The man who has lost