Quinctius, our enemies came in arms, to the very gates of Rome,--and went
away unchastised! But who are they that our dastardly enemies thus
despise?--the consuls, or you, Romans? If we are in fault, depose us, or
punish us yet more severely. If you are to blame--may neither gods nor men
punish your faults! only may you repent!--No, Romans, the confidence of our
enemies is not owing to their courage, or to their belief of your
cowardice; they have been too often vanquished, not to know both themselves
and you. Discord, discord is the ruin of this city! The eternal disputes,
between the senate and the people, are the sole cause of our misfortunes.
While we set no bounds to our dominion, nor you to your liberty; while you
impatiently endure Patrician magistrates, and we Plebeian; our enemies take
heart, grow elated, and presumptuous. In the name of the immortal gods,
what is it, Romans, you would have? You desired Tribunes; for the sake of
peace, we granted them. You were eager to have Decemvirs; we consented to
their creation. You grew weary of these Decemvirs; we obliged them to
abdicate. Your hatred pursued them when reduced to private men; and we
suffered you to put to death, or banish, Patricians of the first rank in
the republic. You insisted upon the restoration of the Tribuneship; we
yielded; we quietly saw Consuls of your own faction elected. You have the
protection of your Tribunes, and the privilege of appeal; the Patricians
are subjected to the decrees of the Commons. Under pretence of equal and
impartial laws, you have invaded our rights; and we have suffered it, and
we still suffer it. When shall we see an end of discord? When shall we have
one interest, and one common country? Victorious and triumphant, you show
less temper than we, under defeat. When you are to contend with us, you can
seize the Aventine hill, you can possess yourselves of the Mons Sacer.
The enemy is at our gates,--the Æsquiline is near being taken,--and nobody
stirs to hinder it! But against us you are valiant, against us you can arm
with diligence. Come on, then, besiege the senate-house, make a camp of the
forum, fill the jails with our chief nobles, and when you have achieved
these glorious exploits, then, at last, sally out at the Æsquiline gate,
with the same fierce spirits, against the enemy. Does your resolution fail
you for this? Go then, and behold from our walls your lands ravaged, your
houses plundered and in flames, the whole country laid waste with fire and
sword. Have you anything here to repair these damages? Will the Tribunes
make up your losses to you? They will give you words as many as you please;
bring impeachments in abundance against the prime men in the State; heap
laws upon laws; assemblies you shall have without end; but will any of you
return the richer from these assemblies? Extinguish, O Romans, these fatal
divisions; generously break this cursed enchantment, which keeps you buried
in a scandalous inaction. Open your eyes and consider the management of
those ambitious men, who, to make themselves powerful in their party, study
nothing but how they may foment divisions in the commonwealth.
CXL.
THE BOSTON MASSACRE.
Tell me, ye bloody butchers! ye villains high and low! ye wretches who
contrived, as well as you who executed, the inhuman deed! do you not feel
the goads and stings of conscious guilt pierce through your savage bosoms?
Though some of you may think yourselves exalted to such a height that bids
defiance to the arms of human justice, and others shroud yourselves beneath
the mask of hypocrisy, and build your hopes of safety on the low arts of
cunning, chicanery, and falsehood; yet do you not sometimes feel the
gnawings of that worm which never dies? Do not the injured shades of
Maverick, Gray, Caldwell, Attucks, and Carr, attend you in your solitary
walks, arrest you even in the midst of your debaucheries, and fill even
your dreams with terror?
Ye dark, designing knaves! ye murderers! parricides! how dare you tread
upon the earth which has drank in the blood of slaughtered innocents, shed
by your wicked hands? How dare you breathe that air which wafted to the ear
of Heaven the groans of those who fell a sacrifice to your accursed
ambition? But, if the laboring earth does not expand her jaws; if the air
you breathe is not commissioned to be the minister of death; yet hear it,
and tremble! the eye of Heaven penetrates the darkest chambers of the
soul; traces the leading clew through all the labyrinths which your
industrious folly has devised; and you, however you may have screened
yourselves from human eyes, must be arraigned, must lift your hands, red
with the blood of those whose deaths you have procured, at the tremendous
bar of God.
John Hancock.
CXLI.
ENTERPRISE OF NEW ENGLAND.
As to the wealth, Mr. Speaker, which the colonies have drawn from the sea
by their fisheries, you had all that matter fully opened at your bar. You
surely thought those acquisitions of value; for they seemed even to excite
your envy; and yet the spirit by which that enterprising employment has
been exercised, ought rather, in my opinion, to have raised your esteem and
admiration. And 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. Whilst we follow them among the
tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest
frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits, whilst 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 whilst 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 hardy 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 constrains 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.
E. Burke.
CXLII.
THE RIGHT OF ENGLAND TO TAX AMERICA.
But Mr. Speaker, "we have a right to tax America." Oh, inestimable right!
Oh, wonderful, transcendent right! the assertion of which has cost this
country thirteen provinces, six islands, one hundred thousand lives, and
seventy millions of money. Oh, invaluable right! for the sake of which we
have sacrificed our rank among nations, our importance abroad, and our
happiness at home! Oh, right! more dear to us than our existence, which has
already cost us so much, and which seems likely to cost us our all.
Infatuated man! Miserable and undone country! not to know that the claim of
right, without the power of enforcing it, is nugatory and idle. We have a
right to tax America, the noble lord tells us therefore we ought to tax
America. This is the profound logic which comprises the whole chain of his
reasoning.
Not inferior to this was the wisdom of him who resolved to shear the wolf.
What, shear a wolf! Have you considered the resistance, the difficulty, the
danger of the attempt? No, says the madman, I have considered nothing but
the right. Man has a right of dominion over the beasts of the forest; and
therefore I will shear the wolf.
How wonderful that a nation could be thus deluded! But the noble lord deals
in cheats and delusions. They are the daily traffic of his invention; and
he will continue to play to his cheats on this House, so long as he thinks
them necessary to his purpose, and so long as he has money enough at
command to bribe gentlemen to pretend that they believe him. But a black
and bitter day of reckoning will surely come; and whenever that day comes,
I trust I shall be able, by a parliamentary impeachment, to bring upon the
heads of the authors of our calamities the punishment they deserve.
E. Burke.
CXLIII.
DESCRIPTION OF JUNIUS.
Sir,--How comes this Junius to have broken through the cobwebs of the law,
and to range uncontrolled, unpunished, through the land? The myrmidons of
the court have been long, and are still pursuing him in vain. They will not
spend their time upon me, or you, or you. No! they disdain such vermin,
when the mighty boar of the forest, that has broken through all their
toils, is before them. But what will all their efforts avail? No sooner has
he wounded one than he lays down another dead at his feet. For my part,
when I saw his attack upon the king, I own my blood ran cold. I thought he
had ventured too far, and there was an end of his triumphs. Not that he had
not asserted many truths:--Yes, sir, there are in that composition many
bold truths, by which a wise prince might profit. It was the rancor and
venom, with which I was struck. In these aspects the North-Briton is as
much inferior to him, as in strength, wit, and judgment.
But while I expected, in this daring flight, his final ruin and fall,
behold him rising still higher, and coming down souse upon both Houses of
Parliament. Yes, he did make you his quarry, and you still bleed from the
wounds of his talons. You crouched, and still crouch, beneath his rage. Nor
has he dreaded the terrors of your brow, sir; he has attacked even you--he
has--and I believe you have no reason to triumph in the encounter. In
short, after carrying away our royal eagle in his pounces, and dashing him
against a rock, he has laid you prostrate. King, lords and commons, are but
the sport of his fury.
Were he a member of this House, what might not be expected from his
knowledge, his firmness, and integrity? He would be easily known by his
contempt of all danger, by his penetration, by his vigor. Nothing would
escape his vigilance and activity. Bad ministers could conceal nothing from
his sagacity; nor could promises nor threats induce him to conceal anything
from the public.
E. Burke.
CXLIV.
TRUE STATESMANSHIP.
The true lawgiver ought to have a heart full of sensibility. He ought to
love and respect his kind, and to fear himself. It may be allowed to his
temperament to catchy his ultimate object with an intuitive glance, but his
movements toward it ought to be deliberate. Political arrangement, as it is
a work for social ends, is to be wrought only by social means. There mind
must conspire with mind. Time is required to produce all the good we aim
at. Our patience will achieve more than our force. If I might venture to
appeal to what is so much out of fashion in Paris, I mean to experience, I
should tell you that in my course I have known, and, according to my
measure, have coöperated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan
which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much
inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in business. By a
slow but well-sustained progress the effect of each step is watched; the
good or ill success of the first gives light to us in the second; and so,
from light to light, we are conducted with safety through the whole series.
We see that the parts of the system do not clash. The evils latent in the
most promising contrivances are provided for as they arise. One advantage
is as little as possible sacrificed to another. We compensate, we
reconcile, we balance. We are enabled to unite into a consistent whole the
various anomalies and contending principles that are found in the minds and
affairs of men. From hence arises not an excellence in simplicity but one
far superior, an excellence in composition. Where the great interests of
mankind are concerned through a long succession of generations, that
succession ought to be admitted into some share in the councils which are
so deeply to affect them. If justice requires this, the work itself
requires the aid of more minds than one age can furnish. It is from this
view of things that the best legislators have been often satisfied with
the establishment of some sure, solid, and ruling principle in government;
a power like to that which some of the philosophers have called a plastic
nature; and having fixed the principle, they have left it afterward to its
own operation.
E. Burke.
CXLV.
THE QUEEN OF FRANCE AND THE SPIRIT OF CHIVALRY.
I hear, and I rejoice to hear, that the great lady, the other object of
the triumph, has borne that day (one is interested that beings made for
suffering should suffer well), and that she bears all the succeeding
days--that she bears the imprisonment of her husband, and her own
captivity, and the exile of her friends, and the insulting adulation of
addresses, and the whole weight of her accumulated wrongs, with a serene
patience, in a manner suited to her rank and race and becoming the
offspring of a sovereign distinguished for her piety and her courage; that,
like her, she has lofty sentiments; that she feels with the dignity of a
Roman matron; that in the last extremity she will save herself; and that,
if she must fall, she will fall by no ignoble hand.
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then
the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which
she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above
the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to
move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendor and
joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate,
without emotion, that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she
added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful
love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against
disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have
lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in
a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords
must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened
her with insult? But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters,
economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is
extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous
loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience,
that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself
the spirit of an exalted freedom.
The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of
manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility
of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound,
which inspired courage while it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever
it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all
its grossness.
E. Burke.
CXLVI.
PERORATION OF OPENING SPEECH AGAINST HASTINGS.
In the name of the Commons of England, I charge all this villany upon
Warren Hastings, in this last moment of my application to you.
My Lords, what is it that we want here to a great act of national justice?
Do we want a cause, my Lords? You care the cause of oppressed princes, of
undone women of the first rank, of desolated provinces, and of wasted
kingdoms.
Do you want a criminal, my Lords? When was there so much iniquity ever laid
to the charge of any one? No, my Lords, you must not look to punish any
other such delinquent from India. Warren Hastings has not left substance
enough in India to nourish such another delinquent.
My Lords, is it a prosecutor you want? You have before you the Commons of
Great Britain as prosecutors; and I believe my Lords, that the sun, in his
beneficent progress round the world, does not behold a more glorious sight
than that of men, separated from a remote people by the material bounds and
barriers of nature, united by the bond of a social and moral community--all
the Commons of England resenting, as their own, the indignities and
cruelties, that are offered to all the people of India.
Do we want a tribunal? My Lords, no example of antiquity, nothing in the
modern world, nothing in the range of human imagination, can supply us with
a tribunal like this. My Lords, here we see virtually, in the mind's eye,
that sacred majesty of the Crown, under whose authority you sit and whose
power you exercise.
We have here all the branches of the royal family, in a situation between
majesty and subjection, between the sovereign and the subject--offering a
pledge, in that situation, for the support of the rights of the Crown and
the liberties of the people, both which extremities they touch.
My Lords, we have a great hereditary peerage here; those who have their own
honor, the honor of their ancestors, and of their posterity, to guard, and
who will justify as they always have justified, that provision in the
Constitution by which justice is made an hereditary office.
My Lords, we have here a new nobility, who have risen, and exalted
themselves by various merits, by great civil and military services, which
have extended the fame of this country from the rising to the setting sun.
My Lords, you have here, also, the lights of our religion; you have the
bishops of England. My Lords, you have that true image of the primitive
Church in its ancient form, in its ancient ordinances, purified from the
superstitions and the vices which a long succession of ages will bring upon
the best institutions.
My Lords, these are the securities which we have in all the constituent
parts of the body of this House. We know them, we reckon, we rest upon
them, and commit safely the interests of India and of humanity into your
hands. Therefore, it is with confidence, that, ordered by the Commons,
I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high crimes and misdemeanors,
I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great Britain, in Parliament
assembled, whose parliamentary trust he has betrayed.
I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of Great Britain, whose
national character he has dishonored.
I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose laws, rights, and
liberties he has subverted, whose property he has destroyed, whose country
he has laid waste and desolate.
I impeach him in the name, and by virtue of those eternal laws of Justice
which he has violated.
I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which he has cruelly
outraged, injured and oppressed, in both sexes, in every age, rank,
situation and condition of life.
E. Burke.
CXLVII.
PERORATION OF CLOSING SPEECH AGAINST HASTINGS.
My Lords, at this awful close, in the name of the Commons, and surrounded
by them, I attest the retiring, I attest the advancing generations between
which, as a link in the great chain of eternal order, we stand.--We call
this Nation, we call the world to witness, that the Commons have shrunk
from no labor; that we have been guilty of no prevarication, that we have
made no compromise with crime; that we have not feared any odium
whatsoever, in the long warfare which we have carried on with the
crimes--with the vices--with the exorbitant wealth--with the enormous and
overpowering influence of Eastern corruption.
My Lords, your House yet stands; it stands as a great edifice; but let me
say, that it stands in ruins that have been made by the greatest moral
earthquake that ever convulsed and shattered this globe of ours. My Lords,
it has pleased Providence to place us in such a state that we appear every
moment to be on the verge of some great mutations. There is one thing, and
one thing only, which defies all mutation; that which existed before the
world, and will survive the fabric of the world itself,--I mean justice;
that justice which, emanating from the Divinity, has a place in the breast
of every one of us, given us for our guide in regard to ourselves, and with
regard to others, and which will stand, after this globe is burned to
ashes, our advocate or our accuser before the great Judge, when He comes to
call upon us for the tenor of a well-spent life.
My Lords, the Commons will share in every fate with yon? Lordships; there
is nothing sinister which can happen to you, in which we shall not be
involved; and, if it should so happen, that we shall be subjected to some
of those frightful changes which we have seen; if it should happen that
your Lordships, stripped of all the decorous distinctions of human society,
should, by hands at once base and cruel, be led to those scaffolds and
machines of murder upon which great kings and glorious queens have shed
their blood, amidst the prelates, amidst the nobles, amidst the
magistrates, who supported their thrones,--may you in those moments feel
that consolation which I am persuaded they felt in the critical moments of
their dreadful agony!
My Lords, there is a consolation, and a great consolation it is, which
often happens to oppressed virtue and fallen dignity; it often happens that
the very oppressors and persecutors themselves are forced to bear testimony
in its favor. The Parliament of Paris had an origin very, very similar to
that of the great court before which I stand; the Parliament of Paris
continued to have a great resemblance to it in its Constitution, even to
its fall; the Parliament of Paris, my Lords,--was; it is gone! It has
passed away; it has vanished like a dream! It fell pierced by the sword of
the Compte de Mirabeau. And yet that man, at the time of his inflicting the
death-wound of that Parliament, produced at once the shortest and the
grandest funeral oration that ever was or could be made upon the departure
of a great court of magistracy. When he pronounced the death sentence upon
that Parliament, and inflicted the mortal wound, he declared that his
motives for doing it were merely political, and that their hands were as
pure as those of justice itself, which they administered--a great and
glorious exit, my Lords, of a great and glorious body!
My Lords, if you must fall, may you so fall! But, if you stand, and stand I
trust you will, together with the fortunes of this ancient
monarchy--together with the ancient laws and liberties of this great and
illustrious kingdom, may you stand as unimpeached in honor as in power; may
you stand, not as a substitute for virtue, but as an ornament of virtue, as
a security for virtue; may you stand long, and long stand the terror of
tyrants; may you stand the refuge of afflicted Nations; may you stand a
sacred temple, for the perpetual residence of an inviolable justice!
E. Burke.
CXLVIII.
THE CRISIS OF THE NATION.
Lay hold on this opportunity of our salvation, Conscript Fathers,--by the
Immortal Gods I conjure you!--and remember that you are the foremost men
here, in the council chamber of the whole earth. Give one sign to the
Roman people that even as now they pledge their valor--so you pledge your
wisdom to the crisis of the State. But what need that I exhort you? Is
there one so insensate as not to understand that if we sleep over an
occasion such as this, it is ours to bow our necks to a tyranny not proud
and cruel only, but ignominious--but sinful? Do ye not know this Antony? Do
ye not know his companions? Do ye not know his whole
house--insolent--impure--gamesters--drunkards? To be slaves to such as he,
to such as these, were it not the fullest measure of misery conjoined with
the fullest measure of disgrace? If it be so--may the gods avert the
omen--that the supreme hour of the republic has come, let us, the rulers of
the world, rather fall with honor, than serve with infamy! Born to glory
and to liberty, let us hold these bright distinctions fast, or let us
greatly die! Be it, Romans, our first resolve to strike down the tyrant and
the tyranny. Be it our second to endure all things for the honor and
liberty of our country. To submit to infamy for the love of life can never
come within the contemplation of a Roman soul! For you, the people of
Rome--you whom the gods have appointed to rule the world--for you to own a
master, is impious.