The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 11 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
History
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 11 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
instead of producing any law document or authority on the usages and
local customs of the country, he has referred to officers in the army,
colonels of artillery and engineers, to young gentlemen just come from
school, not above three or four years in the country. Good God! would
not one rather have expected to hear him put all these travellers to
shame by the authority of a man who had resided so long in the supreme
situation of government,--to set aside all these wild, loose, casual,
and silly observations of travellers and theorists? On the contrary, as
if he was ignorant of everything, as if he knew nothing of India, as if
he had dropped from the clouds, he cites the observations of every
stranger who had been hurried in a palanquin through the country,
capable or incapable of observation, to prove to you the nature of the
government, and of the power he had to exercise.
My Lords, the Commons of Great Britain are not disposed to resort to the
ridiculous relations of travellers, or to the wild systems which
ingenious men have thought proper to build on their authority. We will
take another mode. We will undertake to prove the direct contrary of his
assertions in every point and particular. We undertake to do this,
because your Lordships know, and because the world knows, that, if you
go into a country where you suppose man to be in a servile
state,--where, the despot excepted, there is no one person who can lift
up his head above another,--where all are a set of vile, miserable
slaves, prostrate and confounded in a common servitude, having no
descendible lands, no inheritance, nothing that makes man feel proud of
himself, or that gives him honor and distinction with others,--this
abject degradation will take from you that kind of sympathy which
naturally attaches you to men feeling like yourselves, to men who have
hereditary dignities to support, and lands of inheritance to maintain,
as you peers have; you will, I say, no longer have that feeling which
you ought to have for the sufferings of a people whom you suppose to be
habituated to their sufferings and familiar with degradation. This makes
it absolutely necessary for me to refute every one of these
misrepresentations; and whilst I am endeavoring to establish the rights
of these people, in order to show in what manner and degree they have
been violated, I trust that your Lordships will not think that the time
is lost: certainly I do not think that my labor will be misspent in
endeavoring to bring these matters fully before you.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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