EDMUND BURKE.

BEACONSFIELD, May 26, 1795.

A

LETTER

TO

RICHARD BURKE, ESQ.,

ON

PROTESTANT ASCENDENCY IN IRELAND.

1793.

My dear son,—­We are all again assembled in town, to finish the last, but the most laborious, of the tasks which have been imposed upon me during my Parliamentary service.  We are as well as at our time of life we can expect to be.  We have, indeed, some moments of anxiety about you.  You are engaged in an undertaking similar in its principle to mine.  You are engaged in the relief of an oppressed people.  In that service you must necessarily excite the same sort of passions in those who have exercised, and who wish to continue that oppression, that I have had to struggle with in this long labor.  As your father has done, you must make enemies of many of the rich, of the proud, and of the powerful.  I and you began in the same way.  I must confess, that, if our place was of our choice, I could wish it had been your lot to begin the career of your life with an endeavor to render some more moderate and less invidious service to the public But being engaged in a great and critical work, I have not the least hesitation about your having hitherto done your duty as becomes you.  If I had not an assurance not to be shaken from the character of your mind, I should be satisfied on that point by the cry that is raised against you.  If you had behaved, as they call it, discreetly, that is, faintly and treacherously, in the execution of your trust, you would have had, for a while, the good word of all sorts of men, even of many of those whose cause you had betrayed,—­and whilst your favor lasted, you might have coined that false reputation into a true and solid interest to yourself.  This you are well apprised of; and you do not refuse to travel that beaten road from an ignorance, but from a contempt, of the objects it leads to.

When you choose an arduous and slippery path, God forbid that any weak feelings of my declining age, which calls for soothings and supports, and which can have none but from you, should make me wish that you should abandon what you are about, or should trifle with it!  In this house we submit, though with troubled minds, to that order which has connected all great duties with toils and with perils, which has conducted the road to glory through the regions of obloquy and reproach, and which will never suffer the disparaging alliance of spurious, false, and fugitive praise with genuine and permanent reputation.  We know that the Power which has settled that order, and subjected you to it by placing you in the situation you are in, is able to bring you out of it with credit and with safety.  His will be done!  All must come right.  You may open the way with pain and under reproach:  others will pursue it with ease and with applause.