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

E >> Edmund Burke >> The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12)



THE WORKS

OF

THE RIGHT HONOURABLE

EDMUND BURKE


IN TWELVE VOLUMES

VOLUME THE SEVENTH


[Illustration: Burke Coat of Arms.]


LONDON
JOHN C. NIMMO
14, KING WILLIAM STREET, STRAND, W.C.
MDCCCLXXXVII




CONTENTS OF VOL. VII


FRAGMENTS AND NOTES OF SPEECHES IN PARLIAMENT.

SPEECH ON THE ACTS OF UNIFORMITY, February 6, 1772 3

SPEECH ON A BILL FOR THE RELIEF OF PROTESTANT DISSENTERS,
March 7, 1773 21

SPEECH ON A MOTION FOR LEAVE TO BRING IN A BILL TO REPEAL AND
ALTER CERTAIN ACTS RESPECTING RELIGIOUS OPINIONS, UPON THE
OCCASION OF A PETITION OF THE UNITARIAN SOCIETY, May 11, 1792 39

SPEECH RELATIVE TO THE MIDDLESEX ELECTION, February 7, 1771 59

SPEECH ON A BILL FOR SHORTENING THE DURATION OF PARLIAMENTS,
May 8, 1780 69

SPEECH ON A MOTION FOR A COMMITTEE TO INQUIRE INTO THE STATE OF
THE REPRESENTATION OF THE COMMONS IN PARLIAMENT, May 7, 1782 89

SPEECH ON A MOTION FOR LEAVE TO BRING IN A BILL FOR EXPLAINING
THE POWERS OF JURIES IN PROSECUTIONS FOR LIBELS, March 7, 1771.
TOGETHER WITH A LETTER IN VINDICATION OF THAT MEASURE, AND A
COPY OF THE PROPOSED BILL 105

SPEECH ON A BILL FOR THE REPEAL OF THE MARRIAGE ACT,
June 15, 1781 129

SPEECH ON A MOTION FOR LEAVE TO BRING IN A BILL TO QUIET THE
POSSESSIONS OF THE SUBJECT AGAINST DORMANT CLAIMS OF THE CHURCH,
February 17, 1772 137


HINTS FOR AN ESSAY ON THE DRAMA 143


AN ESSAY TOWARDS AN ABRIDGMENT OF THE ENGLISH HISTORY. IN THREE BOOKS.

BOOK I.

CHAP. I. Causes of the Connection between the Romans and
Britons.--Caesar's two Invasions of Britain 159

II. Some Account of the Ancient Inhabitants of Britain 170

III. The Reduction of Britain by the Romans 189

IV. The Fall of the Roman Power in Britain 214

BOOK II.

CHAP. I. The Entry and Settlement of the Saxons, and their
Conversion to Christianity 227

II. Establishment of Christianity--of Monastic Institutions
--and of their Effects 240

III. Series of Anglo-Saxon Kings from Ethelbert to Alfred:
with the Invasion of the Danes 255

IV. Reign of King Alfred 261

V. Succession of Kings from Alfred to Harold 269

VI. Harold II.--Invasion of the Normans.--Account of that
People, and of the State of England at the Time of the
Invasion 280

VII. Of the Laws and Institutions of the Saxons 291

BOOK III.

CHAP. I. View of the State of Europe at the Time of the Norman
Invasion 327

II. Reign of William the Conqueror 335

III. Reign of William the Second, surnamed Rufus 364

IV. Reign of Henry I 375

V. Reign of Stephen 386

VI. Reign of Henry II 394

VII. Reign of Richard I 425

VIII. Reign of John 437

IX. Fragment.--An Essay towards an History of the Laws of
England 475




FRAGMENTS AND NOTES

OF

SPEECHES.


During the period of Mr. Burke's Parliamentary labors, some alterations
in the Acts of Uniformity, and the repeal of the Test and Corporation
Acts, were agitated at various times in the House of Commons. It appears
from the state of his manuscript papers, that he had designed to publish
some of the Speeches which he delivered in those discussions, and with
that view had preserved the following Fragments and detached Notes,
which are now given to the public with as much order and connection as
their imperfect condition renders them capable of receiving. The
Speeches on the Middlesex Election, on shortening the Duration of
Parliaments, on the Reform of the Representation in Parliament, on the
Bill for explaining the Power of Juries in Prosecutions for libels, and
on the Repeal of the Marriage Act, were found in the same imperfect
state.




SPEECH

ON

THE ACTS OF UNIFORMITY


FEBRUARY 6, 1772.




NOTE.


The following Speech was occasioned by a petition to the House of
Commons from certain clergymen of the Church of England, and certain of
the two professions of Civil Law and Physic, and others, praying to be
relieved from subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, as required by
the Acts of Uniformity. The persona associated for this purpose were
distinguished at the time by the name of "The Feathers Tavern
Association," from the place where their meetings were usually held.
Their petition was presented on the 6th of February, 1772; and on a
motion that it should be brought up, the same was negatived on a
division, in which Mr. Burke voted in the majority, by 217 against 71.




SPEECH.


Mr. Speaker,--I should not trouble the House upon this question, if I
could at all acquiesce in many of the arguments, or justify the vote I
shall give upon several of the reasons which have been urged in favor of
it. I should, indeed, be very much concerned, if I were thought to be
influenced to that vote by those arguments.

In particular, I do most exceedingly condemn all such arguments as
involve any kind of reflection on the personal character of the
gentlemen who have brought in a petition so decent in the style of it,
and so constitutional in the mode. Besides the unimpeachable integrity
and piety of many of the promoters of this petition, which render those
aspersions as idle as they are unjust, such a way of treating the
subject can have no other effect than to turn the attention of the House
from the merits of the petition, the only thing properly before us, and
which we are sufficiently competent to decide upon, to the motives of
the petitioners, which belong exclusively to the Great Searcher of
Hearts.

We all know that those who loll at their ease in high dignities, whether
of the Church or of the State, are commonly averse to all reformation.
It is hard to persuade them that there can be anything amiss in
establishments which by feeling experience they find to be so very
comfortable. It is as true, that, from the same selfish motives, those
who are struggling upwards are apt to find everything wrong and out of
order. These are truths upon one side and on the other; and neither on
the one side or the other in argument are they worth a single farthing.
I wish, therefore, so much had not been said upon these ill-chosen, and
worse than ill-chosen, these very invidious topics.

I wish still more that the dissensions and animosities which had slept
for a century had not been just now most unseasonably revived. But if we
must be driven, whether we will or not, to recollect these unhappy
transactions, let our memory be complete and equitable, let us recollect
the whole of them together. If the Dissenters, as an honorable gentleman
has described them, have formerly risen from a "whining, canting,
snivelling generation," to be a body dreadful and ruinous to all our
establishments, let him call to mind the follies, the violences, the
outrages, and persecutions, that conjured up, very blamably, but very
naturally, that same spirit of retaliation. Let him recollect, along
with the injuries, the services which Dissenters have done to our Church
and to our State. If they have once destroyed, more than once they have
saved them. This is but common justice, which they and all mankind have
a right to.

There are, Mr. Speaker, besides these prejudices and animosities, which
I would have wholly removed from the debate, things more regularly and
argumentatively urged against the petition, which, however, do not at
all appear to me conclusive.

First, two honorable gentlemen, one near me, the other, I think, on the
other side of the House, assert, that, if you alter her symbols, you
destroy the being of the Church of England. This, for the sake of the
liberty of that Church, I must absolutely deny. The Church, like every
body corporate, may alter her laws without changing her identity. As an
independent church, professing fallibility, she has claimed a right of
acting without the consent of any other; as a church, she claims, and
has always exercised, a right of reforming whatever appeared amiss in
her doctrine, her discipline, or her rites. She did so, when she shook
off the Papal supremacy in the reign of Henry the Eighth, which was an
act of the body of the English Church, as well as of the State (I don't
inquire how obtained). She did so, when she twice changed the Liturgy in
the reign of King Edward, when she then established Articles, which were
themselves a variation from former professions. She did so, when she cut
off three articles from her original forty-two, and reduced them to the
present thirty-nine; and she certainly would not lose her corporate
identity, nor subvert her fundamental principles, though she were to
leave ten of the thirty-nine which remain out of any future confession
of her faith. She would limit her corporate powers, on the contrary, and
she would oppose her fundamental principles, if she were to deny herself
the prudential exercise of such capacity of reformation. This,
therefore, can be no objection to your receiving the petition.

In the next place, Sir, I am clear, that the Act of Union, reciting and
ratifying one Scotch and one English act of Parliament, has not rendered
any change whatsoever in our Church impossible, but by a dissolution of
the union between the two kingdoms.

The honorable gentleman who has last touched upon that point has not
gone quite so far as the gentlemen who first insisted upon it. However,
as none of them wholly abandon that post, it will not be safe to leave
it behind me unattacked. I believe no one will wish their interpretation
of that act to be considered as authentic. What shall we think of the
wisdom (to say nothing of the competence) of that legislature which
should ordain to itself such a fundamental law, at its outset, as to
disable itself from executing its own functions,--which should prevent
it from making any further laws, however wanted, and that, too, on the
most interesting subject that belongs to human society, and where she
most frequently wants its interposition,--which should fix those
fundamental laws that are forever to prevent it from adapting itself to
its opinions, however clear, or to its own necessities, however urgent?
Such an act, Mr. Speaker, would forever put the Church out of its own
power; it certainly would put it far above the State, and erect it into
that species of independency which it has been the great principle of
our policy to prevent.

The act never meant, I am sure, any such unnatural restraint on the
joint legislature it was then forming. History shows us what it meant,
and all that it could mean with any degree of common sense.

In the reign of Charles the First a violent and ill-considered attempt
was made unjustly to establish the platform of the government and the
rites of the Church of England in Scotland, contrary to the genius and
desires of far the majority of that nation. This usurpation excited a
most mutinous spirit in that country. It produced that shocking
fanatical Covenant (I mean the Covenant of '36) for forcing their ideas
of religion on England, and indeed on all mankind. This became the
occasion, at length, of other covenants, and of a Scotch army marching
into England to fulfil them; and the Parliament of England (for its own
purposes) adopted their scheme, took their last covenant, and destroyed
the Church of England. The Parliament, in their ordinance of 1648,
expressly assign their desire of conforming to the Church of Scotland as
a motive for their alteration.

To prevent such violent enterprises on the one side or on the other,
since each Church was going to be disarmed of a legislature wholly and
peculiarly affected to it, and lest this new uniformity in the State
should be urged as a reason and ground of ecclesiastical uniformity, the
Act of Union provided that presbytery should continue the Scotch, as
episcopacy the English establishment, and that this separate and
mutually independent Church-government was to be considered as a part of
the Union, without aiming at putting the regulation within each Church
out of its own power, without putting both Churches out of the power of
the State. It could not mean to forbid us to set anything ecclesiastical
in order, but at the expense of tearing up all foundations, and
forfeiting the inestimable benefits (for inestimable they are) which we
derive from the happy union of the two kingdoms. To suppose otherwise is
to suppose that the act intended we could not meddle at all with the
Church, but we must as a preliminary destroy the State.

Well, then, Sir, this is, I hope, satisfactory. The Act of Union does
not stand in our way. But, Sir, gentlemen think we are not competent to
the reformation desired, chiefly from our want of theological learning.
If we were the legal assembly....

If ever there was anything to which, from reason, nature, habit, and
principle, I am totally averse, it is persecution for conscientious
difference in opinion. If these gentlemen complained justly of any
compulsion upon them on that article, I would hardly wait for their
petitions; as soon as I knew the evil, I would haste to the cure; I
would even run before their complaints.

I will not enter into the abstract merits of our Articles and Liturgy.
Perhaps there are some things in them which one would wish had not been
there. They are not without the marks and characters of human frailty.

But it is not human frailty and imperfection, and even a considerable
degree of them, that becomes a ground for your alteration; for by no
alteration will you get rid of those errors, however you may delight
yourselves in varying to infinity the fashion of them. But the ground
for a legislative alteration of a legal establishment is this, and this
only,--that you find the inclinations of the majority of the people,
concurring with your own sense of the intolerable nature of the abuse,
are in favor of a change.

If this be the case in the present instance, certainly you ought to make
the alteration that is proposed, to satisfy your own consciences, and to
give content to your people. But if you have no evidence of this nature,
it ill becomes your gravity, on the petition of a few gentlemen, to
listen to anything that tends to shake one of the capital pillars of the
state, and alarm the body of your people upon that one ground, in which
every hope and fear, every interest, passion, prejudice, everything
which can affect the human breast, are all involved together. If you
make this a season for religious alterations, depend upon it, you will
soon find it a season of religious tumults and religious wars.

These gentlemen complain of hardship. No considerable number shows
discontent; but, in order to give satisfaction to any number of
respectable men, who come in so decent and constitutional a mode before
us, let us examine a little what that hardship is. They want to be
preferred clergymen in the Church of England as by law established; but
their consciences will not suffer them to conform to the doctrines and
practices of that Church: that is, they want to be teachers in a church
to which they do not belong; and it is an odd sort of hardship. They
want to receive the emoluments appropriated for teaching one set of
doctrines, whilst they are teaching another. A church, in any legal
sense, is only a certain system of religious doctrines and practices
fixed and ascertained by some law,--by the difference of which laws
different churches (as different commonwealths) are made in various
parts of the world; and the establishment is a tax laid by the same
sovereign authority for payment of those who so teach and so practise:
for no legislature was ever so absurd as to tax its people to support
men for teaching and acting as they please, but by some prescribed rule.

The hardship amounts to this,--that the people of England are not taxed
two shillings in the pound to pay them for teaching, as divine truths,
their own particular fancies. For the state has so taxed the people; and
by way of relieving these gentlemen, it would be a cruel hardship on the
people to be compelled to pay, from the sweat of their brow, the most
heavy of all taxes to men, to condemn as heretical the doctrines which
they repute to be orthodox, and to reprobate as superstitious the
practices which they use as pious and holy. If a man leaves by will an
establishment for preaching, such as Boyle's Lectures, or for charity
sermons, or funeral sermons, shall any one complain of an hardship,
because he has an excellent sermon upon matrimony, or on the martyrdom
of King Charles, or on the Restoration, which I, the trustee of the
establishment, will not pay him for preaching?--S. Jenyns, Origin of
Evil.--Such is the hardship which they complain of under the present
Church establishment, that they have not the power of taxing the people
of England for the maintenance of their private opinions.

The laws of toleration provide for every real grievance that these
gentlemen can rationally complain of Are they hindered from professing
their belief of what they think to be truth? If they do not like the
Establishment, there are an hundred different modes of Dissent in which
they may teach. But even if they are so unfortunately circumstanced that
of all that variety none will please them, they have free liberty to
assemble a congregation of their own; and if any persons think their
fancies (they may be brilliant imaginations) worth paying for, they are
at liberty to maintain them as their clergy: nothing hinders it. But if
they cannot get an hundred people together who will pay for their
reading a liturgy after their form, with what face can they insist upon
the nation's conforming to their ideas, for no other visible purpose
than the enabling them to receive with a good conscience the tenth part
of the produce of your lands?

Therefore, beforehand, the Constitution has thought proper to take a
security that the tax raised on the people shall be applied only to
those who profess such doctrines and follow such a mode of worship as
the legislature, representing the people, has thought most agreeable to
their general sense,--binding, as usual, the minority, not to an assent
to the doctrines, but to a payment of the tax.

But how do you ease and relieve? How do you know, that, in making a new
door into the Church for these gentlemen, you do not drive ten times
their number out of it? Supposing the contents and not-contents strictly
equal in numbers and consequence, the possession, to avoid disturbance,
ought to carry it. You displease all the clergy of England now actually
in office, for the chance of obliging a score or two, perhaps, of
gentlemen, who are, or want to be, beneficed clergymen: and do you
oblige? Alter your Liturgy,--will it please all even, of those who wish,
an alteration? will they agree in what ought to be altered? And after it
is altered to the mind of every one, you are no further advanced than if
you had not taken a single step; because a large body of men will then
say you ought to have no liturgy at all: and then these men, who now
complain so bitterly that they are shut out, will themselves bar the
door against thousands of others. Dissent, not satisfied with
toleration, is not conscience, but ambition.

You altered the Liturgy for the Directory. This was settled by a set of
most learned divines and learned laymen: Selden sat amongst them. Did
this please? It was considered upon both sides as a most unchristian
imposition. Well, at the Restoration they rejected the Directory, and
reformed the Common Prayer,--which, by the way, had been three times
reformed before. Were they then contented? Two thousand (or some great
number) of clergy resigned their livings in one day rather than read it:
and truly, rather than raise that second idol, I should have adhered to
the Directory, as I now adhere to the Common Prayer. Nor can you content
other men's conscience, real or pretended, by any concessions: follow
your own; seek peace and ensue it. You have no symptoms of discontent in
the people to their Establishment. The churches are too small for their
congregations. The livings are too few for their candidates. The spirit
of religious controversy has slackened by the nature of things: by act
you may revive it. I will not enter into the question, how much truth is
preferable to peace. Perhaps truth may be far better. But as we have
scarcely ever the same certainty in the one that we have in the other, I
would, unless the truth were evident indeed, hold fast to peace, which
has in her company charity, the highest of the virtues.

This business appears in two points of view: 1st, Whether it is a matter
of grievance; 2nd, Whether it is within our province to redress it with
propriety and prudence. Whether it comes properly before us on a
petition upon matter of grievance I would not inquire too curiously. I
know, technically speaking, that nothing agreeable to law can be
considered as a grievance. But an over-attention to the rules of any act
does sometimes defeat the ends of it; and I think it does so in this
Parliamentary act, as much at least as in any other. I know many
gentlemen think that the very essence of liberty consists in being
governed according to law, as if grievances had nothing real and
intrinsic; but I cannot be of that opinion. Grievances may subsist by
law. Nay, I do not know whether any grievance can be considered as
intolerable, until it is established and sanctified by law. If the Act
of Toleration were not perfect, if there were a complaint of it, I would
gladly consent to amend it. But when I heard a complaint of a pressure
on religious liberty, to my astonishment I find that there was no
complaint whatsoever of the insufficiency of the act of King William,
nor any attempt to make it more sufficient. The matter, therefore, does
not concern toleration, but establishment; and it is not the rights of
private conscience that are in question, but the propriety of the terms
which are proposed by law as a title to public emoluments: so that the
complaint is not, that there is not toleration of diversity in opinion,
but that diversity in opinion is not rewarded by bishoprics, rectories,
and collegiate stalls. When gentlemen complain of the subscription as
matter of grievance, the complaint arises from confounding private
judgment, whose rights are anterior to law, and the qualifications which
the law creates for its own magistracies, whether civil or religious. To
take away from men their lives, their liberty, or their property, those
things for the protection of which society was introduced, is great
hardship and intolerable tyranny; but to annex any condition you please
to benefits artificially created is the most just, natural, and proper
thing in the world. When _e nova_ you form an arbitrary benefit, an
advantage, preeminence, or emolument, not by Nature, but institution,
you order and modify it with all the power of a creator over his
creature. Such benefits of institution are royalty, nobility,
priesthood, all of which you may limit to birth; you might prescribe
even shape and stature. The Jewish priesthood was hereditary. Founders'
kinsmen have a preference in the election of fellows in many colleges of
our universities: the qualifications at All Souls are, that they should
be _optime nati, bene vestiti, mediocriter docti_.

By contending for liberty in the candidate for orders, you take away the
liberty of the elector, which is the people, that is, the state. If they
can choose, they may assign a reason for their choice; if they can
assign a reason, they may do it in writing, and prescribe it as a
condition; they may transfer their authority to their representatives,
and enable them to exercise the same. In all human institutions, a great
part, almost all regulations, are made from the mere necessity of the
case, let the theoretical merits of the question be what they will. For
nothing happened at the Reformation but what will happen in all such
revolutions. When tyranny is extreme, and abuses of government
intolerable, men resort to the rights of Nature to shake it off. When
they have done so, the very same principle of necessity of human affairs
to establish some other authority, which shall preserve the order of
this new institution, must be obeyed, until they grow intolerable; and
you shall not be suffered to plead original liberty against such an
institution. See Holland, Switzerland.

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