The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 06 (of 12)

I do not pretend to take pride in an extravagant attachment to any sect. Some gentlemen in Ireland affect that sort of glory. It is to their taste. Their piety, I take it for granted, justifies the fervor of their zeal, and may palliate the excess of it. Being myself no more than a common layman, commonly informed in controversies, leading only a very common life, and having only a common citizen's interest in the Church or in the State, yet to you I will say, in justice to my own sentiments, that not one of those zealots for a Protestant interest wishes more sincerely than I do, perhaps not half so sincerely, for the support of the Established Church in both these kingdoms. It is a great link towards holding fast the connection of religion with the State, and for keeping these two islands, in their present critical independence of constitution, in a close connection of opinion and affection. I wish it well, as the religion of the greater number of the primary land-proprietors of the kingdom, with whom all establishments of Church and Stats, for strong political reasons, ought in my opinion to be firmly connected. I wish it well, because it is more closely combined than any other of the church systems with the crown, which is the stay of the mixed Constitution,—because it is, as things now stand, the sole connecting political principle between the constitutions of the two independent kingdoms. I have another and infinitely a stronger reason for wishing it well: it is, that in the present time I consider it as one of the main pillars of the Christian religion itself. The body and substance of every religion I regard much more than any of the forms and dogmas of the particular sects. Its fall would leave a great void, which nothing else, of which I can form any distinct idea, might fill. I respect the Catholic hierarchy and the Presbyterian republic; but I know that the hope or the fear of establishing either of them is, in these kingdoms, equally chimerical, even if I preferred one or the other of them to the Establishment, which certainly I do not.

These are some of my reasons for wishing the support of the Church of Ireland as by law established. These reasons are founded as well on the absolute as on the relative situation of that kingdom. But is it because I love the Church, and the King, and the privileges of Parliament, that I am to be ready for any violence, or any injustice, or any absurdity, in the means of supporting any of these powers, or all of them together? Instead of prating about Protestant ascendencies, Protestant Parliaments ought, in my opinion, to think at last of becoming patriot Parliaments.

The legislature of Ireland, like all legislatures, ought to frame its laws to suit the people and the circumstances of the country, and not any longer to make it their whole business to force the nature, the temper, and the inveterate habits of a nation to a conformity to speculative systems concerning any kind of laws. Ireland has an established government, and a religion legally established, which are to be preserved. It has a people who are to be preserved too, and to be led by reason, principle, sentiment, and interest to acquiesce in that government. Ireland is a country under peculiar circumstances. The people of Ireland are a very mixed people; and the quantities of the several ingredients in the mixture are very much disproportioned to each other. Are we to govern this mixed body as if it were composed of the most simple elements, comprehending the whole in one system of benevolent legislation? or are we not rather to provide for the several parts according to the various and diversified necessities of the heterogeneous nature of the mass? Would not common reason and common honesty dictate to us the policy of regulating the people, in the several descriptions of which they are composed, according to the natural ranks and classes of an orderly civil society, under a common protecting sovereign, and under a form of constitution favorable at once to authority and to freedom,—such as the British Constitution boasts to be, and such as it is to those who enjoy it?

You have an ecclesiastical establishment, which, though the religion of the prince, and of most of the first class of landed proprietors, is not the religion of the major part of the inhabitants, and which consequently does not answer to them any one purpose of a religious establishment. This is a state of things which no man in his senses can call perfectly happy. But it is the state of Ireland. Two hundred years of experiment show it to be unalterable. Many a fierce struggle has passed between the parties. The result is, you cannot make the people Protestants, and they cannot shake off a Protestant government. This is what experience teaches, and what all men of sense of all descriptions know. To-day the question is this: Are we to make the best of this situation, which we cannot alter? The question is: Shall the condition of the body of the people be alleviated in other things, on account of their necessary suffering from their being subject to the burdens of two religious establishments, from one of which they do not partake the least, living or dying, either of instruction or of consolation,—or shall it be aggravated, by stripping the people thus loaded of everything which might support and indemnify them in this state, so as to leave them naked of every sort of right and of every name of franchise, to outlaw them from the Constitution, and to cut off (perhaps) three millions of plebeian subjects, without reference to property, or any other qualification, from all connection with the popular representation, of the kingdom?

As to religion, it has nothing at all to do with the proceeding. Liberty is not sacrificed to a zeal for religion, but a zeal for religion is pretended and assumed to destroy liberty. The Catholic religion is completely free. It has no establishment,—but it is recognized, permitted, and, in a degree, protected by the laws. If a man is satisfied to be a slave, he may be a Papist with perfect impunity. He may say mass, or hear it, as he pleases; but he must consider himself as an outlaw from the British Constitution. If the constitutional liberty of the subject were not the thing aimed at, the direct reverse course would be taken. The franchise would have been permitted, and the mass exterminated. But the conscience of a man left, and a tenderness for it hypocritically pretended, is to make it a trap to catch his liberty.

So much is this the design, that the violent partisans of this scheme fairly take up all the maxims and arguments, as well as the practices, by which tyranny has fortified itself at all times. Trusting wholly in their strength and power, (and upon this they reckon, as always ready to strike wherever they wish to direct the storm,) they abandon all pretext of the general good of the community. They say, that, if the people, under any given modification, obtain the smallest portion or particle of constitutional freedom, it will be impossible for them to hold their property. They tell us that they act only on the defensive. They inform the public of Europe that their estates are made up of forfeitures and confiscations from the natives; that, if the body of people obtain votes, any number of votes, however small, it will be a step to the choice of members of their own religion; that the House of Commons, in spite of the influence of nineteen parts in twenty of the landed interest now in their hands, will be composed in the whole, or in far the major part, of Papists; that this Popish House of Commons will instantly pass a law to confiscate all their estates, which it will not be in their power to save even by entering into that Popish party themselves, because there are prior claimants to be satisfied; that, as to the House of Lords, though neither Papists nor Protestants have a share in electing them, the body of the peerage will be so obliging and disinterested as to fall in with this exterminatory scheme, which is to forfeit all their estates, the largest part of the kingdom; and, to crown all, that his Majesty will give his cheerful assent to this causeless act of attainder of his innocent and faithful Protestant subjects; that they will be or are to be left, without house or land, to the dreadful resource of living by their wits, out of which they are already frightened by the apprehension of this spoliation with which they are threatened; that, therefore, they cannot so much as listen to any arguments drawn from equity or from national or constitutional policy: the sword is at their throats; beggary and famine at their door. See what it is to have a good look-out, and to see danger at the end of a sufficiently long perspective!

This is, indeed, to speak plain, though to speak nothing very new. The same thing has been said in all times and in all languages. The language of tyranny has been invariable: "The general good is inconsistent with my personal safety." Justice and liberty seem so alarming to these gentlemen, that they are not ashamed even to slander their own titles, to calumniate and call in doubt their right to their own estates, and to consider themselves as novel disseizors, usurpers, and intruders, rather than lose a pretext for becoming oppressors of their fellow-citizens, whom they (not I) choose to describe themselves as having robbed.

Instead of putting themselves in this odious point of light, one would think they would wish to let Time draw his oblivious veil over the unpleasant modes by which lordships and demesnes have been acquired in theirs, and almost in all other countries upon earth. It might be imagined, that, when the sufferer (if a sufferer exists) had forgot the wrong, they would be pleased to forget it too,—that they would permit the sacred name of possession to stand in the place of the melancholy and unpleasant title of grantees of confiscation, which, though firm and valid in law, surely merits the name that a great Roman jurist gave to a title at least as valid in his nation as confiscation would be either in his or in ours: Tristis et luctuosa successio.

Such is the situation of every man who comes in upon the ruin of another; his succeeding, under this circumstance, is tristis et luctuosa successio. If it had been the fate of any gentleman to profit by the confiscation of his neighbor, one would think he would be more disposed to give him a valuable interest under him in his land, or to allow him a pension, as I understand one worthy person has done, without fear or apprehension that his benevolence to a ruined family would be construed into a recognition of the forfeited title. The public of England, the other day, acted in this manner towards Lord Newburgh, a Catholic. Though the estate had been vested by law in the greatest of the public charities, they have given him a pension from his confiscation. They have gone further in other cases. On the last rebellion, in 1745, in Scotland, several forfeitures were incurred. They had been disposed of by Parliament to certain laudable uses. Parliament reversed the method which they had adopted in Lord Newburgh's case, and in my opinion did better: they gave the forfeited estates to the successors of the forfeiting proprietors, chargeable in part with the uses. Is this, or anything like this, asked in favor of any human creature in Ireland? It is bounty, it is charity,—wise bounty, and politic charity; but no man can claim it as a right. Here no such thing is claimed as right, or begged as charity. The demand has an object as distant from all considerations of this sort as any two extremes can be. The people desire the privileges inseparably annexed, since Magna Charta, to the freehold which they have by descent or obtain as the fruits of their industry. They call for no man's estate; they desire not to be dispossessed of their own.

But this melancholy and invidious title is a favorite (and, like favorites, always of the least merit) with those who possess every other title upon earth along with it. For this purpose they revive the bitter memory of every dissension which has torn to pieces their miserable country for ages. After what has passed in 1782, one would not think that decorum, to say nothing of policy, would permit them to call up, by magic charms, the grounds, reasons, and principles of those terrible confiscatory and exterminatory periods. They would not set men upon calling from the quiet sleep of death any Samuel, to ask him by what act of arbitrary monarchs, by what inquisitions of corrupted tribunals and tortured jurors, by what fictitious tenures invented to dispossess whole unoffending tribes and their chieftains. They would not conjure up the ghosts from the ruins of castles and churches, to tell for what attempt to struggle for the independence of an Irish legislature, and to raise armies of volunteers without regular commissions from the crown in support of that independence, the estates of the old Irish nobility and gentry had been confiscated. They would not wantonly call on those phantoms to tell by what English acts of Parliament, forced upon two reluctant kings, the lands of their country were put up to a mean and scandalous auction in every goldsmith's shop in London, or chopped to pieces and out into rations, to pay the mercenary soldiery of a regicide usurper. They would not be so fond of titles under Cromwell, who, if he avenged an Irish rebellion against the sovereign authority of the Parliament of England, had himself rebelled against the very Parliament whose sovereignty he asserted, full as much as the Irish nation, which he was sent to subdue and confiscate, could rebel against that Parliament, or could rebel against the king, against whom both he and the Parliament which he served, and which he betrayed, had both of them rebelled.

The gentlemen who hold the language of the day know perfectly well that the Irish in 1641 pretended, at least, that they did not rise against the king: nor in fact did they, whatever constructions law might put upon their act. But full surely they rebelled against the authority of the Parliament of England, and they openly professed so to do. Admitting (I have now no time to discuss the matter) the enormous and unpardonable magnitude of this their crime, they rued it in their persons, and in those of their children and their grandchildren, even to the fifth and sixth generations. Admitting, then, the enormity of this unnatural rebellion in favor of the independence of Ireland, will it follow that it must be avenged forever? Will it follow that it must be avenged on thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of those whom they can never trace, by the labors of the most subtle metaphysician of the traduction of crimes, or the most inquisitive genealogist of proscription, to the descendant of any one concerned in that nefarious Irish rebellion against the Parliament of England?

If, however, you could find out those pedigrees of guilt, I do not think the difference would be essential. History records many things which ought to make us hate evil actions; but neither history, nor morals, nor policy can teach us to punish innocent men on that account. What lesson does the iniquity of prevalent factions read to us? It ought to lesson us into an abhorrence of the abuse of our own power in our own day, when we hate its excesses so much in other persons and in other times. To that school true statesmen ought to be satisfied to leave mankind. They ought not to call from the dead all the discussions and litigations which formerly inflamed the furious factions which had torn their country to pieces; they ought not to rake into the hideous and abominable things which were done in the turbulent fury of an injured, robbed, and persecuted people, and which were afterwards cruelly revenged in the execution, and as outrageously and shamefully exaggerated in the representation, in order, an hundred and fifty years after, to find some color for justifying them in the eternal proscription and civil excommunication of a whole people.

Let us come to a later period of those confiscations with the memory of which the gentlemen who triumph in the acts of 1782 are so much delighted. The Irish again rebelled against the English Parliament in 1688, and the English Parliament again put up to sale the greatest part of their estates. I do not presume to defend the Irish for this rebellion, nor to blame the English Parliament for this confiscation. The Irish, it is true, did not revolt from King James's power. He threw himself upon their fidelity, and they supported him to the best of their feeble power. Be the crime of that obstinate adherence to an abdicated sovereign, against a prince whom the Parliaments of Ireland and Scotland had recognized, what it may, I do not mean to justify this rebellion more than the former. It might, however, admit some palliation in them. In generous minds some small degree of compassion might be excited for an error, where they were misled, as Cicero says to a conqueror, quadam specie et similitudine pacis, not without a mistaken appearance of duty, and for which the guilty have suffered, by exile abroad and slavery at home, to the extent of their folly or their offence. The best calculators compute that Ireland lost two hundred thousand of her inhabitants in that struggle. If the principle of the English and Scottish resistance at the Revolution is to be justified, (as sure I am it is,) the submission of Ireland must be somewhat extenuated. For, if the Irish resisted King William, they resisted him on the very same principle that the English and Scotch resisted King James. The Irish Catholics must have been the very worst and the most truly unnatural of rebels, if they had not supported a prince whom they had seen attacked, not for any designs against their religion or their liberties, but for an extreme partiality for their sect, and who, far from trespassing on their liberties and properties, secured both them and the independence of their country in much the same manner that we have seen the same things done at the period of 1782,—I trust the last revolution in Ireland.

That the Irish Parliament of King James did in some particulars, though feebly, imitate the rigor which had been used towards the Irish, is true enough. Blamable enough they were for what they had done, though under the greatest possible provocation. I shall never praise confiscations or counter-confiscations as long as I live. When they happen by necessity, I shall think the necessity lamentable and odious: I shall think that anything done under it ought not to pass into precedent, or to be adopted by choice, or to produce any of those shocking retaliations which never suffer dissensions to subside. Least of all would I fix the transitory spirit of civil fury by perpetuating and methodizing it in tyrannic government. If it were permitted to argue with power, might one not ask these gentlemen whether it would not be more natural, instead of wantonly mooting these questions concerning their property, as if it were an exercise in law, to found it on the solid rock of prescription,—the soundest, the most general, and the most recognized title between man and man that is known in municipal or in public jurisprudence?—a title in which not arbitrary institutions, but the eternal order of things, gives judgment; a title which is not the creature, but the master, of positive law; a title which, though not fixed in its term, is rooted in its principle in the law of Nature itself, and is indeed the original ground of all known property: for all property in soil will always be traced back to that source, and will rest there. The miserable natives of Ireland, who ninety-nine in an hundred are tormented with quite other cares, and are bowed down to labor for the bread of the hour, are not, as gentlemen pretend, plodding with antiquaries for titles of centuries ago to the estates of the great lords and squires for whom they labor. But if they were thinking of the titles which gentlemen labor to beat into their heads, where can they bottom their own claims, but in a presumption and a proof that these lands had at some time been possessed by their ancestors? These gentlemen (for they have lawyers amongst them) know as well as I that in England we have had always a prescription or limitation, as all nations have, against each other. The crown was excepted; but that exception is destroyed, and we have lately established a sixty years' possession as against the crown. All titles terminate in prescription,—in which (differently from Time in the fabulous instances) the son devours the father, and the last prescription eats up all the former.

A

LETTER

ON

THE AFFAIRS OF IRELAND.

1797

Dear Sir,—In the reduced state of body and in the dejected state of mind in which I find myself at this very advanced period of my life, it is a great consolation to me to know that a cause I ever have had so very near my heart is taken up by a man of your activity and talents.

It is very true that your late friend, my ever dear and honored son, was in the highest degree solicitous about the final event of a business which he also had pursued for a long time with infinite zeal, and no small degree of success. It was not above half an hour before he left me forever that he spoke with considerable earnestness on this very subject. If I had needed any incentives to do my best for freeing the body of my country from the grievances under which they labor, this alone would certainly call forth all my endeavors.

The person who succeeded to the government of Ireland about the time of that afflicting event had been all along of my sentiments and yours upon this subject; and far from needing to be stimulated by me, that incomparable person, and those in whom he strictly confided, even went before me in their resolution to pursue the great end of government, the satisfaction and concord of the people with whose welfare they were charged. I cannot bear to think on the causes by which this great plan of policy, so manifestly beneficial to both kingdoms, has been defeated.

Your mistake with regard to me lies in supposing that I did not, when his removal was in agitation, strongly and personally represent to several of his Majesty's ministers, to whom I could have the most ready access, the true state of Ireland, and the mischiefs which sooner or later must arise from subjecting the mass of the people to the capricious and interested domination of an exceeding small faction and its dependencies.

That representation was made the last time, or very nearly the last time, that I have ever had the honor of seeing those ministers. I am so far from having any credit with them, on this, or any other public matters, that I have reason to be certain, if it were known that any person in office in Ireland, from the highest to the lowest, were influenced by my opinions, and disposed to act upon them, such an one would be instantly turned out of his employment. Yon have formed, to my person a flattering, yet in truth a very erroneous opinion, of my power with those who direct the public measures. I never have been directly or indirectly consulted about anything that is done. The judgment of the eminent and able persons who conduct public affairs is undoubtedly superior to mine; but self-partiality induces almost every man to defer something to his own. Nothing is more notorious than that I have the misfortune of thinking that no one capital measure relative to political arrangements, and still less that a new military plan for the defence of either kingdom in this arduous war, has been taken upon any other principle than such as must conduct us to inevitable ruin.

In the state of my mind, so discordant with the tone of ministers, and still more discordant with the tone of opposition, you may judge what degree of weight I am likely to have with either of the parties who divide this kingdom,—even though I were endowed with strength of body, or were possessed of any active situation in the government, which might give success to my endeavors. But the fact is, since the day of my unspeakable calamity, except in the attentions of a very few old and compassionate friends, I am totally out of all social intercourse. My health has gone down very rapidly; and I have been brought hither with very faint hopes of life, and enfeebled to such a degree as those who had known me some time ago could scarcely think credible. Since I came hither, my sufferings have been greatly aggravated, and my little strength still further reduced; so that, though I am told the symptoms of my disorder begin to carry a more favorable aspect, I pass the far larger part of the twenty-four hours, indeed almost the whole, either in my bed or lying upon the couch from which I dictate this. Had you been apprised of this circumstance, you could not have expected anything, as you seem to do, from my active exertions. I could do nothing, if I was still stronger, not even si meus adforet Hector.

There is no hope for the body of the people of Ireland, as long as those who are in power with you shall make it the great object of their policy to propagate an opinion on this side of the water that the mass of their countrymen are not to be trusted by their government, and that the only hold which England has upon Ireland consists in preserving a certain very small number of gentlemen in full possession of a monopoly of that kingdom. This system has disgusted many others besides Catholics and Dissenters.

As to those who on your side are in the opposition to government, they are composed of persons several of whom I love and revere. They have been irritated by a treatment too much for the ordinary patience of mankind to bear into the adoption of schemes which, however argumentatively specious, would go practically to the inevitable ruin of the kingdom. The opposition always connects the emancipation of the Catholics with these schemes of reformation: indeed, it makes the former only a member of the latter project. The gentlemen who enforce that opposition are, in my opinion, playing the game of their adversaries with all their might; and there is no third party in Ireland (nor in England neither) to separate things that are in themselves so distinct,—I mean the admitting people to the benefits of the Constitution, and a change in the form of the Constitution itself.

As every one knows that a great part of the constitution of the Irish House of Commons was formed about the year 1614 expressly for bringing that House into a state of dependence, and that the new representative was at that time seated and installed by force and violence, nothing can be more impolitic than for those who wish the House to stand on its present basis (as, for one, I most sincerely do) to make it appear to have kept too much the principle of its first institution, and to continue to be as little a virtual as it is an actual representative of the commons. It is the degeneracy of such an institution, so vicious in its principle, that is to be wished for. If men have the real benefit of a sympathetic representation, none but those who are heated and intoxicated with theory will look for any other. This sort of representation, my dear Sir, must wholly depend, not on the force with which it is upheld, but upon the prudence of those who have influence upon it. Indeed, without some such prudence in the use of authority, I do not know, at least in the present time, how any power can long continue.

If it be true that both parties are carrying things to extremities in different ways, the object which you and I have in common, that is to say, the union and concord of our country on the basis of the actual representation, without risking those evils which any change in the form of our legislature must inevitably bring on, can never be obtained. On the part of the Catholics (that is to say, of the body of the people of the kingdom) it is a terrible alternative, either to submit to the yoke of declared and insulting enemies, or to seek a remedy in plunging themselves into the horrors and crimes of that Jacobinism which unfortunately is not disagreeable to the principles and inclinations of, I am afraid, the majority of what we call the Protestants of Ireland. The Protestant part of that kingdom is represented by the government itself to be, by whole counties, in nothing less than open rebellion. I am sure that it is everywhere teeming with dangerous conspiracy.

I believe it will be found, that, though the principles of the Catholics, and the incessant endeavors of their clergy, have kept them from being generally infected with the systems of this time, yet, whenever their situation brings them nearer into contact with the Jacobin Protestants, they are more or less infected with their doctrines.

It is a matter for melancholy reflection, but I am fully convinced, that many persons in Ireland would be glad that the Catholics should become more and more infected with the Jacobin madness, in order to furnish new arguments for fortifying them in their monopoly. On any other ground it is impossible to account for the late language of your men in power. If statesmen, (let me suppose for argument,) upon the most solid political principles, conceive themselves obliged to resist the wishes of the far more numerous, and, as things stand, not the worse part of the community, one would think they would naturally put their refusal as much as possible upon temporary grounds, and that they would act towards them in the most conciliatory manner, and would talk to them in the most gentle and soothing language: for refusal, in itself, is not a very gracious thing; and, unfortunately, men are very quickly irritated out of their principles. Nothing is more discouraging to the loyalty of any description of men than to represent to them that their humiliation and subjection make a principal part in the fundamental and invariable policy which regards the conjunction of these two kingdoms. This is not the way to give them a warm interest in that conjunction.

My poor opinion is, that the closest connection between Great Britain and Ireland is essential to the well-being, I had almost said, to the very being, of the two kingdoms. For that purpose I humbly conceive that the whole of the superior, and what I should call imperial politics, ought to have its residence here; and that Ireland, locally, civilly, and commercially independent, ought politically to look up to Great Britain in all matters of peace or of war,—in all those points to be guided by her.—and, in a word, with her to live and to die. At bottom, Ireland has no other choice,—I mean, no other rational choice.

I think, indeed, that Great Britain would be ruined by the separation of Ireland; but as there are degrees even in ruin, it would fall the most heavily on Ireland. By such a separation Ireland would be the most completely undone country in the world,—the most wretched, the most distracted, and, in the end, the most desolate part of the habitable globe. Little do many people in Ireland consider how much of its prosperity has been owing to, and still depends upon, its intimate connection with this kingdom. But, more sensible of this great truth, than perhaps any other man, I have never conceived, or can conceive, that the connection is strengthened by making the major part of the inhabitants of your country believe that their ease, and their satisfaction, and their equalization with the rest of their fellow-subjects of Ireland are things adverse to the principles of that connection,—or that their subjection to a small monopolizing junto, composed of one of the smallest of their own internal factions, is the very condition upon which the harmony of the two kingdoms essentially depends. I was sorry to hear that this principle, or something not unlike it, was publicly and fully avowed by persons of great rank and authority in the House of Lords in Ireland.

As to a participation on the part of the Catholics in the privileges and capacities which are withheld, without meaning wholly to depreciate their importance, if I had the honor of being an Irish Catholic, I should be content to expect satisfaction upon that subject with patience, until the minds of my adversaries, few, but powerful, were come to a proper temper: because, if the Catholics did enjoy, without fraud, chicane, or partiality, some fair portion of those advantages which the law, even as now the law is, leaves open to them, and if the rod were not shaken over them at every turn, their present condition would be tolerable; as compared with their former condition, it would be happy. But the most favorable laws can do very little towards the happiness of a people, when the disposition of the ruling power is adverse to them. Men do not live upon blotted paper. The favorable or the hostile mind of the ruling power is of far more importance to mankind, for good or evil, than the black-letter of any statute. Late acts of Parliament, whilst they fixed at least a temporary bar to the hopes and progress of the larger description of the nation, opened to them certain subordinate objects of equality; but it is impossible that the people should imagine that any fair measure of advantage is intended to them, when they hear the laws by which they were admitted to this limited qualification publicly reprobated as excessive and inconsiderate. They must think that there is a hankering after the old penal and persecuting code. Their alarm must be great, when that declaration is made by a person in very high and important office in the House of Commons, and as the very first specimen and auspice of a new government.

All this is very unfortunate. I have the honor of an old acquaintance, and entertain, in common with you, a very high esteem for the few English persons who are concerned in the government of Ireland; but I am not ignorant of the relation these transitory ministers bear to the more settled Irish part of your administration. It is a delicate topic, upon which I wish to say but little, though my reflections upon it are many and serious. There is a great cry against English influence. I am quite sure that it is Irish influence that dreads the English habits.

Great disorders have long prevailed in Ireland. It is not long since that the Catholics were the suffering party from those disorders. I am sure they were not protected as the case required. Their sufferings became a matter of discussion in Parliament. It produced the most infuriated declamation against them that I have ever read. An inquiry was moved into the facts. The declamation was at least tolerated, if not approved. The inquiry was absolutely rejected. In that case, what is left for those who are abandoned by government, but to join with the persons who are capable of injuring them or protecting them as they oppose or concur in their designs? This will produce a very fatal kind of union amongst the people; but it is an union, which an unequal administration of justice tends necessarily to produce.

If anything could astonish one at this time, it is the war that the rulers in Ireland think it proper to carry on against the person whom they call the Pope, and against all his adherents, whenever they think they have the power of manifesting their hostility. Without in the least derogating from the talents of your theological politicians, or from the military abilities of your commanders (who act on the same principles) in Ireland, and without derogating from the zeal of either, it appears to me that the Protestant Directory of Paris, as statesmen, and the Protestant hero, Buonaparte, as a general, have done more to destroy the said Pope and all his adherents, in all their capacities, than the junto in Ireland have ever been able to effect. You must submit your fasces to theirs, and at best be contented to follow with songs of gratulation, or invectives, according to your humor, the triumphal car of those great conquerors. Had that true Protestant, Hoche, with an army not infected with the slightest tincture of Popery, made good his landing in Ireland, he would have saved you from a great deal of the trouble which is taken to keep under a description of your fellow-citizens obnoxious to you from their religion. It would not have a month's existence, supposing his success. This is the alliance which, under the appearance of hostility, we act as if we wished to promote. All is well, provided we are safe from Popery.

It was not necessary for you, my dear Sir, to explain yourself to me (in justification of your good wishes to your fellow-citizens) concerning your total alienation from the principles of the Catholics. I am more concerned in what we agree than in what we differ. You know the impossibility of our forming any judgment upon the opinions, religious, moral, or political, of those who in the largest sense are called Protestants,—at least, as these opinions and tenets form a qualification for holding any civil, judicial, military, or even ecclesiastical situation. I have no doubt of the orthodox opinion of many, both of the clergy and laity, professing the established religion in Ireland, and of many even amongst the Dissenters, relative to the great points of the Christian faith: but that orthodoxy concerns them only as individuals. As a qualification for employment, we all know that in Ireland it is not necessary that they should profess any religion at all: so that the war that we make is upon certain theological tenets, about which scholastic disputes are carried on æquo Marte, by controvertists, on their side, as able and as learned, and perhaps as well-intentioned, as those are who fight the battle on the other part. To them I would leave those controversies. I would turn my mind to what is more within its competence, and has been more my study, (though, for a man of the world, I have thought of those things,)—I mean, the moral, civil, and political good of the countries we belong to, and in which God has appointed your station and mine. Let every man be as pious as he pleases, and in the way that he pleases; but it is agreeable neither to piety nor to policy to give exclusively all manner of civil privileges and advantages to a negative religion, (such is the Protestant without a certain creed,) and at the same time to deny those privileges to men whom we know to agree to an iota in every one positive doctrine which all of us who profess the religion authoritatively taught in England hold ourselves, according to our faculties, bound to believe. The Catholics of Ireland (as I have said) have the whole of our positive religion: our difference is only a negation of certain tenets of theirs. If we strip ourselves of that part of Catholicism, we abjure Christianity. If we drive them from that holding, without engaging them in some other positive religion, (which you know by our qualifying laws we do not,) what do we better than to hold out to them terrors on the one side, and bounties on the other, in favor of that which, for anything we know to the contrary, may be pure atheism?

You are well aware, that, when a man renounces the Roman religion, there is no civil inconvenience or incapacity whatsoever which shall hinder him from joining any new or old sect of Dissenters, or of forming a sect of his own invention upon the most anti-christian principles. Let Mr. Thomas Paine obtain a pardon, (as on change of ministry he may,) there is nothing to hinder him from setting up a church of his own in the very midst of you. He is a natural-born British subject. His French citizenship does not disqualify him, at least upon a peace. This Protestant apostle is as much above all suspicion of Popery as the greatest and most zealous of your sanhedrim in Ireland can possibly be. On purchasing a qualification, (which his friends of the Directory are not so poor as to be unable to effect,) he may sit in Parliament; and there is no doubt that there is not one of your tests against Popery that he will not take as fairly, and as much ex animo, as the best of your zealot statesmen. I push this point no further, and only adduce this example (a pretty strong one, and fully in point) to show what I take to be the madness and folly of driving men, under the existing circumstances, from any positive religion whatever into the irreligion of the times, and its sure concomitant principles of anarchy.

When religion is brought into a question of civil and political arrangement, it must be considered more politically than theologically, at least by us, who are nothing more than mere laymen. In that light, the case of the Catholics of Ireland is peculiarly hard, whether they be laity or clergy. If any of them take part, like the gentleman you mention, with some of the most accredited Protestants of the country, in projects which cannot be more abhorrent to your nature and disposition than they are to mine,—in that case, however few these Catholic factions who are united with factious Protestants may be, (and very few they are now, whatever shortly they may become,) on their account the whole body is considered as of suspected fidelity to the crown, and as wholly undeserving of its favor. But if, on the contrary, in those districts of the kingdom where their numbers are the greatest, where they make, in a manner, the whole body of the people, (as, out of cities, in three fourths of the kingdom they do,) these Catholics show every mark of loyalty and zeal in support of the government, which at best looks on them with an evil eye, then their very loyalty is turned against their claims. They are represented as a contented and happy people, and that it is unnecessary to do anything more in their favor. Thus the factious disposition of a few among the Catholics and the loyalty of the whole mass are equally assigned as reasons for not putting them on a par with those Protestants who are asserted by the government itself, which frowns upon Papists, to be in a state of nothing short of actual rebellion, and in a strong disposition to make common cause with the worst foreign enemy that these countries have ever had to deal with. What in the end can come of all this?

As to the Irish Catholic clergy, their condition is likewise most critical. If they endeavor by their influence to keep a dissatisfied laity in quiet, they are in danger of losing the little credit they possess, by being considered as the instruments of a government adverse to the civil interests of their flock. If they let things take their course, they will be represented as colluding with sedition, or at least tacitly encouraging it. If they remonstrate against persecution, they propagate rebellion. Whilst government publicly avows hostility to that people, as a part of a regular system, there is no road they can take which does not lead to their ruin.

If nothing can be done on your side of the water, I promise you that nothing will be done here. Whether in reality or only in appearance I cannot positively determine, but you will be left to yourselves by the ruling powers here. It is thus ostensibly and above-board; and in part, I believe, the disposition is real. As to the people at large in this country, I am sure they have no disposition to intermeddle in your affairs. They mean you no ill whatever; and they are too ignorant of the state of your affairs to be able to do you any good. Whatever opinion they have on your subject is very faint and indistinct; and if there is anything like a formed notion, even that amounts to no more than a sort of humming that remains on their ears of the burden of the old song about Popery. Poor souls, they are to be pitied, who think of nothing but dangers long passed by, and but little of the perils that actually surround them.

I have been long, but it is almost a necessary consequence of dictating, and that by snatches, as a relief from pain gives me the means of expressing my sentiments. They can have little weight, as coming from me; and I have not power enough of mind or body to bring them out with their natural force. But I do not wish to have it concealed that I am of the same opinion, to my last breath, which I entertained when my faculties were at the best; and I have not held back from men in power in this kingdom, to whom I have very good wishes, any part of my sentiments on this melancholy subject, so long as I had means of access to persons of their consideration.

I have the honor to be, &c.

END OF VOL. VI

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Works of the Right Honourable

Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12), by Edmund Burke

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BURKE VOL 6 ***

***** This file should be named 15702-h.htm or 15702-h.zip *****

This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: