The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 05 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
History
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 05 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
facility. The third is of another kind, but to the same effect: That the
legal quays are too confined, and there is not sufficient accommodation
for the landing and shipping of cargoes. And the fourth and last is
still different: they describe the avenues to the legal quays (which,
little more than a century since, the great fire of London opened and
dilated beyond the measure of our then circumstances) to be now
"incommodious, and much too narrow for the great concourse of carts and
other carriages usually passing and repassing therein." Thus our trade
has grown too big for the ancient limits of Art and Nature. Our streets,
our lanes, our shores, the river itself, which has so long been our
pride, are impeded and obstructed and choked up by our riches. They are,
like our shops, "bursting with opulence." To these misfortunes, to these
distresses and grievances alone, we are told, it is to be imputed that
still more of our capital has not been pushed into the channel of our
commerce, to roll back in its reflux still more abundant capital, and
fructify the national treasury in its course. Indeed, my dear Sir, when
I have before my eyes this consentient testimony of the corporation of
the city of London, the West India merchants, and all the other
merchants who promoted the other plans, struggling and contending which
of them shall be permitted to lay out their money in consonance with
their testimony, I cannot turn aside to examine what one or two violent
petitions, tumultuously voted by real or pretended liverymen of London,
may have said of the utter destruction and annihilation of trade.
This opens a subject on which every true lover of his country, and, at
this crisis, every friend to the liberties of Europe, and of social
order in every country, must dwell and expatiate with delight. I mean to
wind up all my proofs of our astonishing and almost incredible
prosperity with the valuable information given to the Secret Committee
of the Lords by the Inspector-General. And here I am happy that I can
administer an antidote to all despondence from the same dispensary from
which the first dose of poison was supposed to have come. The report of
that committee is generally believed to have derived much benefit from
the labors of the same noble lord who was said, as the author of the
pamphlet of 1795, to have led the way in teaching us to place all our
hope on that very experiment which he afterwards declared in his place
to have been from the beginning utterly without hope. We have now his
authority to say, that, as far as our resources were concerned, the
experiment was equally without necessity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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