[ top ] The State of Ireland: Surely the state of Ireland ought for ever to teach parties moderation in their victories. People crushed by law have no hopes but for power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous more or less [...]. (Letter to Charles Fox, 8 Oct. 1777; Corr., II, 387.)
Rebellion of 1641 (Burke being under suspicion of Jacobite sympathies): That the Irish Rebellion of 1641 was not only (as our silly things called Histories call it) not utterly unprovoked but that no History, that I have ever read furnishes an Instance of any that was so provoke, and that in almost all parts of it, it has been extremely and most absurdly misrepresented. (Corr. II, pp.282, 284-5; see Conor Cruise OBrien, The Great Melody, 1992, q.p.). [ top ] The Penal Laws (1): [A] machine of wise and deliberate contrivance 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. (Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe relative to [...] the Roman Catholics of Ireland, 1792; quoted in Frank OConnor, Book of Ireland, 1979, p.371; also quoted in Introduction to Life of Chief Justice Blackburne, and Selections from the writings of the Rev. Sydney Smith, 1771-1845 - with var. as follows: it is a system of elaborate contrivance as well fitted ...&c.)
The Penal Laws (1): [...] This species of universal subserviency, that makes the very servant who waits behind your chair the arbiter of your life and fortune, had such a tendency to degrade and abase mankind, and to deprive them of that assured and liberal state of mind which can make us what we ought to be, that I vow to God I would sooner bring myself to put a man to immediate death for opinions I disliked, and so to get rid of the man and his opinions at once, than to fret him with a feverish being, tainted with the jail-distemper of a contagious servitude, to keep him above ground - an animated mass of putrefaction, corrupted himself, and corrupting all about him. (Mr. Burkes Speech at the Guildhall in Bristol, quoted in C. C. OBrien, Introduction to Irish Affairs, 1988 Edn., p.xxxi.)
Penal Laws (3): Now as to the other point, that the objects of these Laws suffer voluntarily; this seems to me to be an insult rather than an argument. For besides that it toally annihilates every characteristick, and therfore every faulty idea of persecution, just as the former does; it supposes, what is false in fact, that it it is in a mans moral power to change his religion whenever his convenience requires it. If he be beforehand satisfied that your opinion is better than his, he will voluntarily come over to you, and without compulsion; and then your Law would be unnecessary; but if he is not so convinced, he must know that it is his duty in this point to sacrifice his interest here to his opinion of his eternal happiness, else he could have in reality no religion at all. (Tract, Works, VI, p.331; Cruise OBrien, The Great Melody, p.42.) [ top ] Penal Laws (4): [T]o transfer humanity from its natural basis, our legitimate and homebred connexions; to lose all feeling for those who have grown up by our sides, in our eyes, of the benefits of whose cares and labours we have partaken from our birth, and meretriciously to hunt abroad after foreign affections is such a disarrangement of the whole system of our duties, that I do not know whether benevolence so displaced is not almost the same thing as destroyed, or what effect bigotry could have produced that is more fatal to society. (Tract [ &c.]; quoted by Seamus Deane, Edmund Burke and the Ideology of Irish Liberalism, in The Irish Mind, ed. Richard Kearney, Dublin: Wolfhound Press 1985, p.143.) Further: From what I have observed, it is pride, arrogance and a spirit of domination, and not a bigoted spirit of religion, that has caused and kept up these oppressive statutes. I am sure I have known those who have oppressed papists in their civil rights, exceedingly indulgent to them in their religious ceremonies, and who really wished them to continue Catholics, in order to furnish pretences for oppression. (ibid., p.146.
Penal Laws (6): This confinement of landed property to one set of hands, and preventing its free circulation through the country, is a most leading article of ill policy; because it is one of the most capital discouragements to all that industry which may be employed on the improvement of the soil, or is any way conversant about land. A tenure of thirty years is evidently no tenure upon which to build, to plant, to raise enclosures, to change the nature of the ground, to make any new experiment which might improve agriculture, or to do anything more than what may answer the immediate and momentary calls of rent to the landlord, and leave subsistence to the tenant and his family. [...] Allow a man but a temporary possession, lay it down as a maxim that he never can have any other, and you immediately and infallibly turn him to temporary enjoyments; and these enjoyments are never the pleasures of labour and free industry, whose quality it is to famish the present hours, and squander all upon prospect and futurity; they are, on the contrary, those of a thoughtless, loitering, and dissipated life. (Tracts ... relative to the laws against Popery, 1763; in Letters, Speeches and Tracts on Irish Affairs [ed. Matthew Arnold, 1881], rep. edn., intro. Conor Cruise O'Brien, Irish Affairs: Edmund Burke, Cresset 1988, p.60.) [ top ] Protestant Ascendancy [1]: I think I can hardly overrate the malignity of the principles of Protestant ascendency [sic], as they affect Ireland; or of Indianism, as they affect these countries, and they affect Asia; or of Jacobinism as they affect all Europe, and the state of human society itself. The last is the greatest evil. But it readily combines with the others, and flows from them. (Second Letter Sir Hercules Langrishe, 26 May 1795), in Correspondence. VIII, pp.253-255.)
Protestant Ascendancy [4]: I think I can hardly overrate the malignancy of the principles of Protestant Ascendancy, as they affect Ireland; or of Indianism as they affect these countries, and as they affect Asia; or of Jacobinism, as they affect all Europe and the state of human society itself. The last is the greatest evil. But it really combines with the others, and flows from them [ ]. Whatever tends to persuade the people, that the few, called by whatever name you please, religious or political, are of the opinion that their interest is not compatible with that of the many, is a great point gained for Jacobinism. (2nd Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe; in Letters, Speeches and Tracts on Irish Affairs, ed. Matthew Arnold; facs. rep. with an intro. by Conor Cruise OBrien, Cresset Press 1988, pp.336-37; quoted in Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature, Hutchinson 1985, p.146.) Note: the following is omitted in the ellipsis, above: Whatever breeds discontent at this time will produce that great master-mischief most infallibly. Whatever tends to persuade the people that the few, called by whatever name you please, religious or political, are of opinion [336] that their interest is not compatible with that of the many is a great point gained to Jacobinism.
Protestant Ascendancy [5]: I have nothing more to say just now upon the Directory in Ireland [i.e., the Ascendancy], which, indeed, is alone worth any mention at all. As to the half-dozen (or half-score as it may be) of gentlemen, who, under various names of authority, are sent from hence to be the subordinate agents of that low order of beings, I consider them as wholly out of the question. Their virtues or their vices, their ability or their weakness, are matters of no sort of consideration. You feel the thing very rightly. All the evils of Ireland originate within itself. That unwise body, the United Irishmen, have had the folly to represent those evils as owing to this country, when, in truth, its chief guilt is in its total neglect, its utter oblivion, its shameful indifference, and its entire ignorance of Ireland, and of everything that relates to it, and not in any oppressive disposition towards that unknown region. No such disposition exists. English Government has farmed out Ireland, without the reservation of a pepper-corn rent in power or influence, public or individual, to the little narrow [422] faction that domineers there. Through that alone they see, feel, hear, or understand, anything relative to that kingdom. Nor do they any way interfere, that I know of, except in giving their countenance, and the sanction of their names, to whatever is done by that junto. (Letter to Thomas Keogh, 17 Nov. 1796; in Letters, Speeches and Tracts on Irish Affairs, Macmillan, ed. Matthew Arnold [1881], facs. rep. as Irish Affairs [by] Edmund Burke, with an intro. by Conor Cruise OBrien, London: Cresset Press 1988, idem; for full-text version under Burke in RICORSO Library, Irish Classics, infra.) [ top ] Irelands opportunity (in Speech on Moving Resolutions for Conciliation with America, 1775): Ireland has never in the situation of power in which she now stands. She has the Ballance of the empire and perhaps its fate forever, in her hands. (Quoted in Frank OGorman, Edmund Burke: His Political Philosophy, London: Allen & Unwin 1973, p.82; cited in Daphne Abernethy, MA Diss., UUC 1998, p.15.) See also: America has pointed out to [Ireland], not the rule of her conduct, but her just claims upon this country. The people of Ireland have reasoned fairly and justly: the colonies, they know have been offered the most that their own most sanguine expectations could aspire to, a free trade with all the world [...] America, for her revolt, has had a choice of favours. (Q.source.)
Indianism: Our Government and our laws are beset by two different Enemies, which are sapping its foundation, Indianism and Jacobinism. In some cases they act separately, in some they act in conjunction: but of this I am sure; that the Worst is worst by far, and the hardest to deal with; and for this amongst other reasons, that it weakens[,] discredits, and ruins that force, which ought to be employed with the greatest Credit and Energy against the other; and that it furnishes Jacobinism with its strongest arms against all formal government. (1796 [R. B. McDowell, ed., The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII (Cambridge UP 1969), p.254]; quoted in Sunil Agnani, Jacobinism in India, Indianism in English Parliament: Fearing the Enlightenment and Colonial Modernity with Edmund Burke, in Cultural Critique, Winter 2008, pp.131-62 [summary; available at Muse online; accessed 10.03.2011.) [Note: the sentence is [ top ] First principles: [U]ntaught feelings [ ] incapable of definition but not impossible to be discerned; The principles of true politics are those of morality enlarged, and I neither now do or ever will admit any other; (on regulation of the colonies:) government ought to be adapted to them and to conform itself to the nature of things, and not endeavour to force them. (All quoted in review of Iane Crowe, ed., Edmund Burke, His life and legacy, Four Courts, 1997; in Irish Studies Review, Summer 1998, p.74.)
[ top ] On the loss of his son: Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succession, I should have been, according to my mediocrity and the mediocrity of the age I live in, a sort of a founder of a family: 1 should have left a son, who, in all the points in which personal merit can be viewed, science, in erudition, in genius, in taste, in honour, in generosity, in humanity, in every liberal sentiment, and every liberal accomplishsment, would not have shown himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford [Russel], or any of those whom he traces in his line. His grace very soon would have wanted all plausibility in his attack upon that provision, which belonged more to mine than to me. He would soon have supplied [454] every deficiency, and symmetrised evety disproportion. It would not have been for that successor to resort to any stagnant wasting reservoir of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient, living spring, of generous and manly action. Every day he lived he would have re-purchased the bounty of the crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he had received. He was made a public creature ; and had no enjoyment whatever, but in the performance of some duty. At this exigent moment, the loss of a finished man is not easily supplied. / But a disposer whose power we are little able to resist, and whose wisdom it behoves us not at all to dispute, has ordained it in another manner, and (whatever my querulous weakness might suggest) a far better. The storm has gone over me; and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honours; I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth! There, and prostrate there. I most unfeignedly recognise the divine justice, and in some degree submit to it. But whilst I humble myself before God, I do not know that it is forbidden to repel the attacks of unjust and inconsiderate men. The patience of Job is proverbial. After some of the convulsive struggles of our irritable nature, he submitted himself, and repented in dust and ashes. But even so, I do not find him blamed for reprehending, and with a considerable degree of verbal asperity, those ill-natured neighbours of his, who visited his dunghill to read moral, political, and economical lectures on his misery. I am alone. I have none to meet my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my lord, I greatly deceive myself, if in this hard season I would give a peck of refuse wheat for all that is called fame and honour in the world. This is the appetite but of a few. It is a luxury; it is a privilege: it is an indulgence for those who are at their ease. But we are all of us made to shun disgrace, as we are made to shrink from pain, and poverty, and disease. It is an instinct; and, under the direction of reason, instinct is always in the right. I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me, are gone before me. They who should have been to me as posterity, are in the place of ancoistors. I owe to the dearest relation (which ever must subsist in memory) that act of piety, which lie would have performed to me; I owe it to him to shew that he was not descended, as the Duke of Bedford would have it, from an unworthy parent. (James Burke, ed., The Speeches [... &c.], 1853; 1862 Edn.; Select Passages from Burkes Letters, pp.454-56.)
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