=Source.=--_Speech in the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, Esq._ Edmund
Burke. Vol. viii. of his Collected Works. London: G. Bell and Sons.
1908.
My lords, I have done; the part of the Commons is concluded. With a
trembling solicitude we consign this product of our long, long labours
to your charge. Take it!--take it! It is a sacred trust. Never before
was a cause of such magnitude submitted to any human tribunal.
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 labour; 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. This war, my lords, we have waged for twenty-two years,
and the conflict has been fought at your lordships’ bar for the last
seven years. My lords, twenty-two years is a great space in the scale
of the life of man; it is no inconsiderable space in the history of a
great nation. A business which has so long occupied the councils and
the tribunals of Great Britain, cannot possibly be huddled over in
the course of vulgar, trite, and transitory events. Nothing but some
of those great revolutions that break the traditionary chain of human
memory, and alter the very face of nature itself, can possibly obscure
it. My lords, we are all elevated to a degree of importance by it; the
meanest of us will, by means of it, more or less become the concern of
posterity, if we are yet to hope for such a thing in the present state
of the world as a recording, retrospective, civilized posterity; but
this is in the hands of the great Disposer of events; it is not ours
to settle how it shall be. My lords, your House yet stands; it stands
as a great edifice; but let me say, that it stands in the midst of
ruins; in the midst of the 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 upon 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 with 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 your 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 favour. I do not like to go for instances a great way
back into antiquity. I know very well that length of time operates
so as to give an air of the fabulous to remote events, which lessens
the interest and weakens the application of examples. I wish to come
nearer to the present time. Your lordships know and have heard, for
which of us has not known and heard, of the parliament of Paris? 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 I will say, that 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. Though
he had himself smarted under its lash, as every one knows who knows
his history (and he was elevated to dreadful notoriety in history),
yet 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! And never was a eulogy pronounced
upon a body more deserved. They were persons in nobility of rank, in
amplitude of fortune, in weight of authority, in depth of learning,
inferior to few of those that hear me. My lords, it was but the other
day that they submitted their necks to the axe; but their honour was
unwounded. Their enemies, the persons who sentenced them to death,
were lawyers, full of subtlety; they were enemies, full of malice; yet
lawyers full of subtlety, and enemies full of malice, as they were,
they did not dare to reproach them with having supported the wealthy,
the great, and powerful, and of having oppressed the weak and feeble,
in any of their judgments, or of having perverted justice in any one
instance whatever, through favour, through interest, or cabal.
My lords, if you must fall, may you so fall! But if you stand, and
stand I trust you will, together with the fortune of this ancient
monarchy--together with the ancient laws and liberties of this great
and illustrious kingdom, may you stand as unimpeached in honour 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.