Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund BurkeBurke, Edmund
Philosophy
Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke
Burke, Edmund
Burke, Edmund, 1729-1797; Essays; Political science; Speeches, addresses, etc.
without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank, or sacredness of
function, fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in
a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers, and
the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity, in an
unknown and hostile land. Those who were able to evade the tempest fled
to the walled cities. But escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they
fell into the jaws of famine.
The alms of the settlement in this dreadful exigency, were certainly
liberal; and all was done by charity that private charity could do;
but it was a people in beggary; it was a nation which stretched out its
hands for food. For months together these creatures of sufferance, whose
very excess and luxury in their most plenteous days had fallen short of
the allowance of our austerest fasts, silent, patient, resigned, without
sedition or disturbance, almost without complaint, perished by an
hundred a day in the streets of Madras; every day seventy at least laid
their bodies in the streets, or on the glacis of Tanjore, and expired
of famine in the granary of India. I was going to awake your justice
towards this unhappy part of our fellow-citizens, by bringing before
you some of the circumstances of this plague of hunger. Of all the
calamities which beset and waylay the life of man, this comes the
nearest to our heart, and is that wherein the proudest of us all feels
himself to be nothing more than he is: but I find myself unable to
manage it with decorum: these details are of a species of horror so
nauseous and disgusting; they are so degrading to the sufferers and to
the hearers; they are so humiliating to human nature itself, that, on
better thoughts, I think it more advisable to throw a pall over this
hideous object, and to leave it to your general conceptions.
REFORMATION AND ANARCHY CONTRASTED AND COMPARED.
That the house must perceive, from his coming forward to mark an
expression or two of his best friend, how anxious he was to keep the
distemper of France from the least countenance in England, where he was
sure some wicked persons had shown a strong disposition to recommend an
imitation of the French spirit of reform. He was so strongly opposed to
any the least tendency towards the MEANS of introducing a democracy like
theirs, as well as to the END itself, that much as it would afflict him,
if such a thing could be attempted, and that any friend of his could
concur in such measures (he was far, very far, from believing they
could), he would abandon his best friends, and join with his worst
enemies to oppose either the means or the end; and to resist all violent
exertions of the spirit of innovation, so distant from all principles of
true and safe reformation; a spirit well calculated to overturn states,
but perfectly unfit to amend them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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