Edmund Burke’s speech on conciliation with
America is probably the greatest oration ever delivered in the English parliament. Given on March 22, 1775 in the House of Commons, it was a tour de force and
an instant classic. Elsewhere I have excerpted the passages in his address
explicating the sources of American freedom. Here he gives his main proposition
of peace and answers the hardliners who wanted a showdown with refractory
colonies. He unfolds a perceptive argument showing the disutility of force as a
means of keeping the colonies subservient, urges a return to the “salutary
neglect” governing American policy until 1763, and gives a profound exposition
of the nature of Britain's imperial constitution. Only a British constitution that recognized colonial freedom, he argued, could keep the colonists within
the empire.
The PROPOSITION is peace. Not peace through the
medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and
endless negotiations; not peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented
from principle, in all parts of the Empire; not peace to depend on the
juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking the
shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simple peace, sought in its
natural course and its ordinary haunts. It is peace sought in the spirit of
peace, and laid in principles purely pacific. I propose, by removing the ground
of the difference, and by restoring the former unsuspecting confidence of
the Colonies in the mother country, to give permanent satisfaction to your
people; and, far from a scheme of ruling by discord, to reconcile them to each
other in the same act, and by the bond of the very same interest, which
reconciles them to British government.
My idea is
nothing more. Refined policy ever has been the parent of confusion, and ever
will be so long as the world endures. Plain good intention, which is as easily
discovered at the first view as fraud is surely detected at last, is (let me
say) of no mean force in the government of mankind. Genuine simplicity of heart
is a healing and cementing principle. My plan, therefore, being formed upon the
most simple grounds imaginable, may disappoint some people when they hear it.
It has nothing to recommend it to the pruriency of curious ears. There is
nothing at all new and captivating in it. It has nothing of the splendor of the
project which has been lately laid upon your table by the noble lord in the
blue ribbon [Lord North]. It does not propose to fill your lobby
with squabbling colony agents, who will require the interposition of your mace
at every instant to keep the peace among them. It does not institute a
magnificent auction of finance, where captivated provinces come to general
ransom by bidding against each other, until you knock down the hammer, and
determine a proportion of payments beyond all the powers of algebra to equalize
and settle.
* * *
* * *
Burke goes on to
describe the growth in American population, trade, and agriculture, arguing
that it shows that England ought not “to trifle with so large a mass of the
interests and feelings of the human race. You could at no time do so without
guilt; and, be assured, you will not do it long with impunity.” The growth in American
agricultural output meant that the old world had increasingly been fed by the
new: “The scarcity which you have felt would have been a desolating famine, if
this child of your old age, with a true filial piety, with a Roman charity, had
not put the full breast of its youthful exuberance to the mouth of its
exhausted parent.” All this before descanting on the exploits of New England
fishermen:
Pray, sir, what
in the world is equal to it? Pass by the other parts, and look at the manner in
which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale fishery.
While we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them
penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson’s Bay and Davis’
Straits—while we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that
they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold—that they are at the
antipodes, and engaged under the frozen Serpent of the south. Falkland Island,
which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national
ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious
industry.
Nor is the
equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both
the poles. We know that while some of them draw the line, and strike the
harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their
gigantic game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their
fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the
perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm
sagacity of English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous mode of hard
industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people—a
people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into
the bone of manhood. When I contemplate these things—when I know that the
Colonies in general owe little or nothing to any care of ours, and that they
are not squeezed into this happy form by the constraints of watchful and
suspicious government, but that, through a wise and salutary neglect, a
generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection—when I
reflect upon these effects—when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel
all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human
contrivances melt and die away within me. My rigor relents. I pardon something
to the spirit of liberty.
I am sensible,
sir, that all which I have asserted in my detail is admitted in the gross; but
that quite a different conclusion is drawn from it. 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.
First, sir, permit
me to observe, that the use of force alone is but temporary. It may
subdue for a moment, but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again;
and a nation is not governed which is perpetually to be conquered.
My next
objection is its uncertainty. Terror is not always the effect of force;
and an armament is not a victory. If you do not succeed, you are without
resource; for, conciliation failing, force remains; but, force failing, no
further hope of reconciliation is left. Power and authority are sometimes
bought by kindness but they can never be begged as alms by an impoverished and
defeated violence.
A further
objection to force is, that you impair the object by your very endeavors
to preserve it. The thing you fought for is not the thing which you recover;
but depreciated, sunk, wasted, and consumed in the contest. Nothing less will
content me than whole America. I do not choose to consume its strength
along with our own, because in all parts it is the British strength that I
consume. I do not choose to be caught by a foreign enemy at the end of this
exhausting conflict, and still less in the midst of it. I may
escape; but I can make no insurance against such an event. Let me add, that I
do not choose wholly to break the American spirit, because it is the spirit
that has made the country.
These, sir, are
my reasons for not entertaining that high opinion of untried force, by which
many gentlemen, for whose sentiments in other particulars I have great respect,
seem to be so greatly captivated.
* * *
* * *
Burke subsequently
explores the sources of American’s love of freedom (see here), buttressing his view that changing the temper and character of the colonies was
impossible:
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.
I think it is
nearly as little in our power to change their republican religion as their free
descent; or to substitute the Roman Catholic as a penalty, or the Church of
England as an improvement. The mode of inquisition and dragooning is going out
of fashion in the Old World, and I should not confide much to their efficacy in
the new. The education of the Americans is also on the same unalterable bottom
with their religion. You can not persuade them to burn their books of curious
science; to banish their lawyers from their courts of law; or to quench the
lights of their assemblies, by refusing to choose those persons who are best
read in their privileges. It would be no less impracticable to think of wholly
annihilating the popular assemblies in which these lawyers sit. The army, by which
we must govern in their place, would be far more chargeable to us; not quite so
effectual; and perhaps, in the end, fully as difficult to be kept in obedience.
But let us
suppose all these moral difficulties got over. The ocean remains. You can not
pump this dry; and as long as it continues in its present bed, so long all the
causes which weaken authority by distance will continue.
“Ye gods!
annihilate but space and time,
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And
make two lovers happy!”
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At this
proposition I must pause a moment. The thing seems a great deal too big for my
ideas of jurisprudence. It should seem, to my way of conceiving such matters,
that there is a very wide difference in reason and policy between the mode of
proceeding on the irregular conduct of scattered individuals, or even of bands
of men, who disturb order within the State, and the civil dissensions which
may, from time to time, on great questions, agitate the several communities
which compose a great empire. It looks to me to be narrow and pedantic to apply
the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest. I do not
know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people. I can not insult
and ridicule the feelings of millions of my fellow creatures, as Sir Edward
Coke insulted one excellent individual at the bar. I am not
ripe to pass sentence on the gravest public bodies, intrusted with magistracies
of great authority and dignity, and charged with the safety of their fellow
citizens, upon the very same title that I am. I really think that, for wise
men, this is not judicious; for sober men, not decent; for minds tinctured with
humanity, not mild and merciful.
Perhaps, sir, I
am mistaken in my idea of an empire, as distinguished from a single state or
kingdom. But my idea of it is this: that an empire is the aggregate of many
states, under one common head, whether this head be a monarch or a presiding
republic. It does, in such constitutions, frequently happen (and nothing but
the dismal, cold, dead uniformity of servitude can prevent its happening) that
the subordinate parts have many local privileges and immunities. Between these
privileges and the supreme common authority, the line may be extremely nice. Of
course, disputes—often, too, very bitter disputes, and much ill blood, will
arise. But, tho every privilege is an exemption, in the case, from the ordinary
exercise of the supreme authority, it is no denial of it. The claim of a
privilege seems rather, ex vi termini, to imply a superior power; for to
talk of the privileges of a state or of a person who has no superior, is hardly
any better than speaking nonsense.
Now, in such
unfortunate quarrels among the component parts of a great political union of
communities, I can scarcely conceive anything more completely imprudent than
for the head of the Empire to insist that, if any privilege is pleaded against
his will or his acts, that his whole authority is denied; instantly to
proclaim rebellion, to beat to arms, and to put the offending Provinces under
the ban. Will not this, sir, very soon teach the Provinces to make no
distinctions on their part? Will it not teach them that the government against
which a claim of liberty is tantamount to high treason, is a government to
which submission is equivalent to slavery? It may not always be quite
convenient to impress dependent communities with such an idea.
We are, indeed,
in all disputes with the Colonies, by the necessity of things, the judge. It is
true, sir; but I confess that the character of judge in my own cause is a thing
that frightens me. Instead of filling me with pride, I am exceedingly humbled
by it. I can not proceed with a stern, assured, judicial confidence, until I
find myself in something more like a judicial character. I must have these
hesitations as long as I am compelled to recollect that, in my little reading
upon such contests as these, the sense of mankind has at least as often decided
against the superior as the subordinate power. Sir, let me add, too, that the
opinion of my having some abstract right in my favor would not put me much at
my ease in passing sentence, unless I could be sure that there were no rights
which in their exercise under certain circumstances, were not the most odious
of all wrongs, and the most vexatious of all injustice. Sir, these
considerations have great weight with me, when I find things so circumstanced
that I see the same party at once a civil litigant against me in point of right
and a culprit before me: while I sit as criminal judge on acts of his whose
moral quality is to be decided on upon the merits of that very litigation. Men
are every now and then put, by the complexity of human affairs, into strange
situations; but justice is the same, let the judge be in what situation he
will.
In this
situation, let us seriously and coolly ponder. What is it we have got by all
our menaces, which have been many and ferocious? What advantage have we derived
from the penal laws we have passed, and which, for the time, have been severe
and numerous? What advances have we made toward our object by the sending of a
force which, by land and sea, is no contemptible strength? Has the disorder
abated? Nothing less. When I see things in this situation, after such confident
hopes, bold promises, and active exertions, I can not, for my life, avoid a
suspicion that the plan itself is not correctly right.
If, then, the removal of the causes of this spirit of
American liberty be, for the greater part, or rather entirely, impracticable;
if the ideas of criminal process be inapplicable, or, if applicable, are in the
highest degree inexpedient, what way yet remains? No way is open but the third
and last—to comply with the American spirit as necessary, or, if you please, to
submit to it as a necessary evil.
If we adopt this mode, if we mean to conciliate and concede,
let us see, of what nature the concessions ought to be. To ascertain the nature
of our concession, we must look at their complaint. The Colonies complain that
they have not the characteristic mark and seal of British freedom. They
complain that they are taxed in Parliament in which they are not represented.
If you mean to satisfy them at all, you must satisfy them with regard to this
complaint. If you mean to please any people, you must give them the boon which
they ask; not what you may think better for them, but of a kind totally
different. Such an act may be a wise regulation, but is no concession, whereas
our present theme is the mode of giving satisfaction.
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?
Such is steadfastly my opinion of the absolute necessity of
keeping up the concord of this Empire by a unity of spirit, tho in a diversity
of operations, that, if I were sure the Colonists had, at their leaving this
country, sealed a regular compact of servitude; that they had solemnly abjured
all the rights of citizens; that they had made a vow to renounce all ideas of
liberty for them and their posterity to all generations, yet I should hold
myself obliged to conform to the temper I found universally prevalent in my own
day, and to govern two millions of men, impatient of servitude, on the
principles of freedom. 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
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 explores the ways and means of settling the revenue question and reducing other causes of asperity. Then comes his rousing conclusion.
* * *
Burke explores the ways and means of settling the revenue question and reducing other causes of asperity. Then comes his rousing conclusion.
My hold of the
Colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred
blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, tho
light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the Colonies always keep the
idea of their civil rights associated with your government; they will cling and
grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from
their allegiance. But let it be once understood that your government may be one
thing, and their privileges another; that these two things may exist without
any mutual relation; the cement is gone; the cohesion is loosened; and
everything hastens to decay and dissolution.
As long as you
have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the
sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith;
wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship Freedom, they will turn
their faces toward you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have.
The more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience.
Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil. They may
have it from Spain; they may have it from Prussia; but, until you become lost
to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can
have from none but you. This is the commodity of price, of which you have the
monopoly. This is the true Act of Navigation, which binds to you the commerce
of the Colonies, and through them secures to you the wealth of the world. Deny
them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond which
originally made, and must still preserve, the unity of the Empire. Do not
entertain so weak an imagination as that your registers and your bonds, your
affidavits and your sufferances, your cockets and your clearances, are what
form the great securities of your commerce. Do not dream that your letters of
office, and your instructions, and your suspending clauses, are the things that
hold together the great contexture of this mysterious whole. These things do
not make your government. Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is
the spirit of the English communion that gives all their life and efficacy to
them. It is the spirit of the English Constitution, which, infused through the
mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the
empire, even down to the minutest member.
All this, I
know well enough, will sound wild and chimerical to the profane herd of those
vulgar and mechanical politicians, who have no place among us; a sort of people
who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material, and who,
therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of
empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. But to men truly initiated
and rightly taught, these ruling and master principles, which, in the opinion
of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in truth
everything and all in all. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest
wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together. If we are
conscious of our situation, and glow with zeal to fill our place as becomes our
station and ourselves, we ought to auspicate all our public proceeding on
America with the old warning of the Church, sursum corda! We ought to
elevate our minds to the greatness of that trust to which the order of
Providence has called us. By adverting to the dignity of this high calling, our
ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire, and have made
the most extensive and the only honorable conquests not by destroying, but by
promoting, the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race. Let us get
an American revenue as we have got an American empire. English privileges have
made it all that it is; English privileges alone will make it all that it can
be.
