The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 06 (of 12) eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 407 pages of information about The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 06 (of 12).

The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 06 (of 12) eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 407 pages of information about The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 06 (of 12).

All this is very honorable to you.  But in what light must we see it?  How are we to consider your armament without commission from the crown, when some of the first people in this kingdom have been refused arms, at the time they did not only not reject, but solicited the king’s commissions?  Here to arm and embody would be represented as little less than high treason, if done on private authority:  with you it receives the thanks of a Privy Counsellor of Great Britain, who obeys the Irish House of Lords in that point with pleasure, and is made Secretary of State, the moment he lands here, for his reward.  You shortened the credit given to the crown to six months; you hung up the public credit of your kingdom by a thread; you refused to raise any taxes, whilst you confessed the public debt and public exigencies to be great and urgent beyond example.  You certainly acted in a great style, and on sound and invincible principles.  But if we in the opposition, which fills Ireland with such loyal horrors, had even attempted, what we never did even attempt, the smallest delay or the smallest limitation of supply, in order to a constitutional coercion of the crown, we should have been decried by all the court and Tory mouths of this kingdom, as a desperate faction, aiming at the direct ruin of the country, and to surrender it bound hand and foot to a foreign enemy.  By actually doing what we never ventured to attempt, you have paid your court with such address, and have won so much favor with his Majesty and his cabinet, that they have, of their special grace and mere motion, raised you to new titles, and for the first time, ill a speech from the throne, complimented you with the appellation of “faithful and loyal,”—­and, in order to insult our low-spirited and degenerate obedience, have thrown these epithets and your resistance together in our teeth!  What do you think were the feelings of every man who looks upon Parliament in an higher light than that of a market-overt for legalizing a base traffic of votes and pensions, when he saw you employ such means of coercion to the crown, in order to coerce our Parliament through that medium?  How much his Majesty is pleased with his part of the civility must be left to his own taste.  But as to us, you declared to the world that you knew that the way of bringing us to reason was to apply yourselves to the true source of all our opinions and the only motive to all our conduct!  Now, it seems, you think yourselves affronted, because a few of us express some indignation at the minister who has thought fit to strip us stark naked, and expose the true state of our poxed and pestilential habit to the world!  Think or say what you will in Ireland, I shall ever think it a crime hardly to be expiated by his blood.  He might, and ought, by a longer continuance or by an earlier meeting of this Parliament, to have given us the credit of some wisdom in foreseeing and anticipating an approaching force.  So far

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The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 06 (of 12) from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.