Speech on Conciliation with America
Edmund Burke
American State Papers
Kolbe Library
Kolbe Home
March 22, 1775
To restore order and repose to an empire so great and
so distracted as ours is, merely in the attempt, an undertaking that would
ennoble the flights of the highest genius, and obtain pardon for the efforts
of the meanest understanding. Struggling a good while with these thoughts, by
degrees I felt myself more firm. I derived, at length, some confidence from
what in other circumstances usually produces timidity. I grew less anxious,
even from the idea of my own insignificance. For, judging of what you are by
what you ought to be, I persuaded myself that you would not reject a
reasonable proposition because it had nothing but its reason to recommend it.
2 The proposition is peace. Not peace through the
medium of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and
endless negotiations; not peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented
from principle, in all parts of the empire; not peace to depend on the
juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking the
shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simple peace, sought in its
natural course and in its ordinary haunts.
3 Let the colonies always keep the idea of their
civil rights associated with your government-they will cling and grapple to you, and
no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But
let it be once understood that your government may be one thing and their
privileges another, that these two things may exist without any mutual
relation - the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything
hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the
sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred
temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of
England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you. The more they
multiply, the more friends you will have, the more ardently they love liberty,
the more perfect will be their obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere. It
is a weed that grows in every soil. They may have it from Spain, they may have
it from Prussia. But until you become lost to all feeling of your true
interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you.
This is the commodity of price, of which you have the monopoly. This is the
true Act of Navigation, which binds to you the commerce of the -colonies, and
through them secures to you the wealth of the world. Deny them this
participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond which originally made,
and must still preserve, the unity of the empire. Do not entertain so weak an
imagination as that your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and your
sufferances, your cockets and your clearances, are what form the great
securities of your commerce. Do not dream that your Letters of office, and
your instructions, and your suspending clauses are the things that hold
together the great contexture of this mysterious whole. These things do not
make your government. Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the
spirit of the English communion that gives all their life and efficacy to
them. It is the spirit of the English constitution which, infused through the
mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivffles every part of the
empire, even down to the minutest member.
4 Is it not the same virtue which does every thing for
us here in England? Do you imagine, then, that-it is the Land-Tax Act which
raises your revenue? that it is the annual vote in the Committee of Supply,
which gives you your army? or that it is the Mutiny Bill which inspires it
with bravery and discipline? No! surely, no! It is the love of the people; it
is their attachment to their government, from the sense of the deep stake they
have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy,
and infuses into both that liberal obedience without which your army would be
a base rabble and your navy nothing but rotten timber.
5 All this, I know well enough, will sound wild and
chimerical to the profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians who
have no place among us: a sort of people who think that nothing exists but
what is gross and material, and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be
directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the
machine. But to men truly initiated and rightly taught, these ruling and
master principles, which in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned have
no substantial existence, are in truth everything, and all in all. Magnanimity
in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little
minds go ill together. If we are conscious of our situation, and glow with
zeal to fill our places as becomes our station and ourselves, we ought to
auspicate all our public proceedings on America with the old warning of the
Church, Sursum corda! We ought to elevate our minds to the greatness of
that trust to which the order of Providence has called us. By adverting to the
dignity of this high calling, our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness
into a glorious empire, and have made the most extensive and the only
honorable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the
number, the happiness of the human race. Let us get an American revenue as we
have got an American empire. English privileges have made it all that it is;
English privileges alone will make it all it can he.
March 22, 1775
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