Edmund Burke: Quotations (2)

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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.)

On the citizens of Ireland: ‘It is neither more nor less than the resolution of one set of people in Ireland to consider themselves the sole citizens of the commonwealth; and to keep a domination over the rest by reducing them to absolute slavery under a military power; and, thus fortified in their power, to divide the public estate, which is the result of general contribution, as a military body solely among themselves.’

On the ‘Ascendancy’ (letter to Richard Burke): ‘But there is an interior history of Ireland, the genuine voice of its records and monuments, which speaks a very different language from those histories, from Temple and from Clarendon; these restore nature to its just rights and policy to its proper order [. ... and it says] that these rebellions were not produced by toleration but by persecution.’ (Corr. 1, p.202; quoted in W. J. McCormack, Burke to Beckett, 1994 [q.p.]; also, more extensively in Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, Cape, 1995, p.19).

On land-ownership: ‘It is possible that many estates about you were originally acquired by arms - that is, by violence; a thing almost as bad as superstition, and not much short of ignorance; but [it] is the old violence; and that which might be wrong in the beginning is consecrated by time and becomes lawful.’ (Quoted in W. J. McCormack, From Burke to Beckett: Ascendancy, Tradition, and Betrayal in Literary History (Cork UP 1994), [cp.69].)

Further: ‘If it can be shown that the great rebellions of Ireland have arisen from attempts to reduce the natives to the state to which they are now reduced, it will show that an attempt to continue them in that state will rather be disadvantageous to the public peace than any kind of security to it.’ (q.source). [Several of the foregoing cited in Stanley Ayling, Edmund Burke, 1988.]

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 O’Brien, The Great Melody, 1992, q.p.).

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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 O’Connor, Book of Ireland, 1979, p.371; also 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.’;

Penal Laws [2]: ‘It [the Penal Laws] is 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 very proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man.’ [480; ...] You are to weigh, with the temper which is natural to you, whether it may be for the safety of our establishment that the Catholics should be ultimately persuaded that they have no hope to enter into the Constitution but through the Dissenters ...’ [483]. (1st Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe ..., 1792; pagination in square brackets refers to Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody (1992) where these remarks are quoted.

The Penal Laws [3]: ‘[...] 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. Burke’s Speech at the Guildhall in Bristol”, quoted in C. C. O’Brien, Introduction to Irish Affairs, 1988 Edn., p.xxxi.)

The Penal Laws [4]: ‘All the penal laws of that unparalleled code of oppression which were made after the last event [viz 1691] were manifestly the effects of national hatred and scorn towards a conquered people, whom the victors delighted to trample upon, and were not at all afraid to provoke. They were not the effect of their fears but of their security.’ (Tract Relative to the Laws Against Popery; q. source.)

Penal Laws [5]: ‘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 man’s 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 O’Brien, The Great Melody, p.42.)

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Penal Laws [6]: ‘[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 [7]: ‘Let three millions of the people but abandon all that they and their ancestors have been taught to believe sacred, and to forswear it publicly in terms the most degrading and scurrilous, and indecent for men of integrity and virtue, and to abuse the whole of their former lives, and to slander the education they have received, - nothing more is required of them.’ (Letter to Richard Burke, Esq., in Irish Affairs [ed. Arnold, 1881], 1988 edn., p.353; cf. ‘A plebeian oligarchy is a monster …’, in Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, as supra.)

Penal Laws [8]: ‘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.)

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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 [2]: ‘A word has been lately struck in the mint of the Castle of Dublin; thence it was conveyed to the Tholsel, or city-hall, where, having passed the touch of the corporation, so respectably stamped and vouched, it soon became current in parliament, and was carried back by the Speaker of the House of Commons in great pomp, as an offering of homage from whence it came. The word is Ascendancy. It is not absolutely new. But the sense in which I have hitherto seen it used was to signify an influence obtained over the minds of some other person by love or reverence, or by superior management or dexterity. &c.’ (Letter to Richard Burke, 1793, quoted in W. J. McCormack, Tradition in Anglo-Irish Literary History from 1789 to 1937, OUP 1985, pp.61-96 [from Burke's Irish Affairs, ed. Matthew Arnold, rep. with intro. by Conor Cruise O’Brien, Cresset Press 1988, p.348]).

Note: the same is given in Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991), pp.845-50, where it is called locus classicus of Burke’s discussion of the ascendancy. Deane remarks that the phrase ‘Protestant ascendancy’ was first used in letter from Earl of Westmoreland Lord Lieutenant, to Home Sec. Henry Dundas, on 14 Jan. 1792 and that the city corporation met at Exhibition Hall, Tholsel, on William St., the following day and described the status quo as a ‘Protestant ascendancy’ in a loyal address to the King.

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 O’Brien, 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 [2]: ‘I cannot conceive what mode of oppression in civil life, or what mode of religious persecution may not come within the methods of preserving an ascendency [sic]. In plain old English, as they apply it, it signifies pride and dominion on the one part of the relation, and on the other subserviency and contempt - and it signifies nothing else. The old words are as fit to be set to music as the new; bt use has long since affixed them their true signification, and they sound, as the other will, harshly and odiously to the moral and intelligent ear of mankind. / This ascendency, by being a Protestant ascendency, does not better it from the combination of a note or two more i nthis anti-harmonic scale. If Protestant ascendency means the prescription from citizenship of by far the major part of the people of any country, then Protestant ascendency is a bad thing, and it ought to have no existence. But there is a deeper evil. By the use that is frequently made of the term … the name Protestant becomes nothing more or better than the name of a persecuting faction, with a relation of some sort of theological hostility to others, but without any sort of ascertained tenets of its own, upon the grounds of which it persecutes other men; for the patrons of this Protestant Ascendancy neither do, nor can by anything positive, define or describe what they mean by the word Protestant.’ (Irish Affairs, p.350; quoted [in part] in Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 1995, p.419 - from ‘But there is a deeper evil ....’ to ‘... the word Protestant’ [ end.])

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 O’Brien, London: Cresset Press 1988, idem; for full-text copy under Burke in RICORSO Library, “Irish Classics”, infra.)

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Ireland’s 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 O’Gorman, 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.)

Imperial tiger: ‘I can contemplate without dread a royal or a national tiger on the borders of Pegu. I can look at him with an easy curiosity, as a prisoner within bars in the menagerie of the tower. But if, by habeas corpus or other otherwise, he was to come into the lobby of the House of Commons while your door was open, any of you would be more stout than wise, who would not gladly make your escape out of the back windows. I certainly should dread more from a wild cat in my bed-chamber than from all the lions in the desert behind Algiers. But in this parallel it is the lions and tigers that are in our chambers and lobbies.’ (Works, Boston 1869, Vol. 5, 225; quoted in Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, London: Jonathan Cape 1995, with attendent comment: ‘In his later years, Burke chose to imagine the return of the repressed in the figure of an animal from the colonies, now unleashed on the mother of parliaments’, p.19.)

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

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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.)

Further: ‘the fresh ruins of France’; ‘Society is a partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are living, and those who are dead, and those who are to be born.’ (Works, II, p.368; Conor Cruise O’Brien, ed., Reflections, pp.194-95.)

Leading principles: ‘One of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are concentrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters, that they should think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste of the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after a ruin instead of a habitation.’

Morality & Reason: ‘Nothing universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral or on any political subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters. The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions. These exceptions and modifications are not made by the process of logic, but by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the standard of them all. Metaphysics cannot live without definition; but prudence is cautious how she defines.’ (Bohn Works, III, p.15).

Act of Union [would be justifed] ‘in some nearly desperate crisis of the whole empire’ (Letter to Earl Fitzwilliam, c.26 Sept. 1794; Corr., VIII, p.21; quoted in Kevin Whelan, ‘The Other Within: Ireland, Britain and the Act of Union’, in Acts of Union: The Causes, Contexts and Consequences of the Act of Union, ed. Dáire Keogh & Kevin Whelan, Dublin: Four Courts Press 2001, p.21.)

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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 Burke’s Letters”, pp.454-56.)

A grave man: ‘The landed security I mean is the grave ... All these things dispose me to it more and more. My inheritance is anticipated. My son is gone before me.’ (Cited in Douglas Archibald, ‘Edmund Burke and the Conservative Imagination’, Alan Harrison, ed., Eighteenth-Century Ireland, Dublin 1995, p.139; quoted in Daphne Abernethy, MA Diss., UUC 1998, p.88.)