The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 10 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
History
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 10 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
Here, my Lords, is a man sent to execute one of the most dreadful
offices that was ever executed by man,--to cut off, as he says himself,
with a bleeding heart, the only remaining allowance made for hundreds of
the decayed nobility and gentry of a great kingdom, driven by our
government from the offices upon which they existed. In this moment of
anxiety and affliction, when he says he felt pain and was cut to the
heart to do it,--at this very moment, when he was turning over fourteen
hundred of the ancient nobility and gentry of this country to downright
want of bread,--just at that moment, while he was doing this act, and
feeling this act in this manner, from the collected morsels forced from
the mouths of that indigent and famished nobility he gorged his own
ravenous maw with an allowance of two hundred pounds a day for his
entertainment. As we see him in this business, this man is unlike any
other: he is also never corrupt but he is cruel; he never dines without
creating a famine; he does not take from the loose superfluity of
standing greatness, but falls upon the indigent, the oppressed, and
ruined; he takes to himself double what would maintain them. His is
unlike the generous rapacity of the noble eagle, who preys upon a
living, struggling, reluctant, equal victim; his is like that of the
ravenous vulture, who falls upon the decayed, the sickly, the dying, and
the dead, and only anticipates Nature in the destruction of its object.
His cruelty is beyond his corruption: but there is something in his
hypocrisy which is more terrible than his cruelty; for, at the very time
when with double and unsparing hands he executes a proscription, and
sweeps off the food of hundreds of the nobility and gentry of a great
country, his eyes overflow with tears, and he turns the precious balm
that bleeds from wounded humanity, and is its best medicine, into fatal,
rancorous, mortal poison to the human race.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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