The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 04 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
Philosophy
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 04 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
I think that this small, inconsiderable
change, (relative to an exclusive statute not made at the Revolution,)
for restoring the people to the benefits from which the green soreness
of a civil war had not excluded them, will be productive of no sort of
mischief whatsoever. Compare what was done in 1782 with what is wished
in 1792; consider the spirit of what has been done at the several
periods of reformation; and weigh maturely whether it be exactly true
that conciliatory concessions are of good policy only in discussions
between nations, but that among descriptions in the same nation they
must always be irrational and dangerous. What have you suffered in your
peace, your prosperity, or, in what ought ever to be dear to a nation,
your glory, by the last act by which you took the property of that
people under the protection of the _laws_? What reasons have you to
dread the consequences of admitting the people possessing that property
to some share in the protection of the _Constitution_?
I do not mean to trouble you with anything to remove the objections, I
will not call them arguments, against this measure, taken from a
ferocious hatred to all that numerous description of Christians. It
would be to pay a poor compliment to your understanding or your heart.
Neither _your_ religion nor _your_ politics consist "in odd, perverse
antipathies." You are not resolved to persevere in proscribing from the
Constitution so many millions of your countrymen, because, in
contradiction to experience and to common sense, you think proper to
imagine that their principles are subversive of common human society. To
that I shall only say, that whoever has a temper which can be gratified
by indulging himself in these good-natured fancies ought to do a great
deal more. For an exclusion from the privileges of British subjects is
not a cure for so terrible a distemper of the human mind as they are
pleased to suppose in their countrymen. I rather conceive a
participation in those privileges to be itself a remedy for some mental
disorders.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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