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
Do we want a tribunal? My Lords, no example of antiquity, nothing in the
modern world, nothing in the range of human imagination, can supply us
with a tribunal like this. My Lords, here we see virtually, in the
mind's eye, that sacred majesty of the crown, under whose authority you
sit, and whose power you exercise. We see in that invisible authority,
what we all feel in reality and life, the beneficent powers and
protecting justice of his Majesty. We have here the heir-apparent to the
crown, such as the fond wishes of the people of England wish an
heir-apparent of the crown to be. We have here all the branches of the
royal family, in a situation between majesty and subjection, between the
sovereign and the subject,--offering a pledge in that situation for the
support of the rights of the crown and the liberties of the people, both
which extremities they touch. My Lords, we have a great hereditary
peerage here,--those who have their own honor, the honor of their
ancestors and of their posterity to guard, and who will justify, as they
have always justified, that provision in the Constitution by which
justice is made an hereditary office. My Lords, we have here a new
nobility, who have risen and exalted themselves by various merits,--by
great military services which have extended the fame of this country
from the rising to the setting sun. We have those who, by various civil
merits and various civil talents, have been exalted to a situation which
they well deserve, and in which they will justify the favor of their
sovereign, and the good opinion of their fellow-subjects, and make them
rejoice to see those virtuous characters that were the other day upon a
level with them now exalted above them in rank, but feeling with them in
sympathy what they felt in common with them before. We have persons
exalted from the practice of the law, from the place in which they
administered high, though subordinate, justice, to a seat here, to
enlighten with their knowledge and to strengthen with their votes those
principles which have distinguished the courts in which they have
presided.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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