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General SummaryThe British statesman, publicist, and orator, Edmund Burke, was born in Dublin in 1729 n/a. He attended Trinity College in his native city, where Oliver Goldsmith was a student at the same time, and after taking a degree began the study of law in London. From law Burke passed to literature and politics; in 1765 he became private secretary to the Whig prime minister, Lord Rockingham, and in 1766 he entered the House of Commons. Burke’s parliamentary career lasted until three years before his death in 1794. It was a very eminent career, culminating in his championship of the American colonists as against George III and the Tory government of Great Britain. No one, in or out of parliament, did more than Burke to enlighten Englishmen about the true condition of affairs in America, to set forth the American point of view, and to plead with his country-men for the adoption of a wise and generous policy toward the colonists. His two great speeches on American Taxation and on Conciliation with America afford perhaps the best contemporary view of the causes which produced the Revolutionary War.
Historical SummaryThe speech on American Taxation was delivered April 19, 1774, in the debate on the repeal of the tea duty. That duty formed the sole remnant of the taxes imposed by the Townshend Acts (1767) and had been purposely left when the rest were repealed (1770), in order to assert the right of parliamentary control over the colonists in matters of taxation. Burke argued that the tea duty was not only unproductive but also most impolitic: it irritated the colonists, alienated their sympathies, and might, if persisted in, lead to their separation from the mother country.
CHAPTER XIII
Burke’s Defense of the American Colonists1
67. A Warning to Great Britain2
Again, and again, revert to your own principles — seek peace,
and pursue it1 — leave America, if she has taxable matter in her, to
tax herself. I am not here going into the distinctions of rights,
not attempting to mark their boundaries. I do not enter into
these metaphysical distinctions; I hate the very sound of them.
Leave the Americans as they anciently stood, and these distinctions,
born of our unhappy contest, will die along with it. They
and we, and their and our ancestors, have been happy under
that system. Let the memory of all actions, in contradiction
to that good old mode, on both sides, be extinguished for ever.
Be content to bind America by laws of trade; you have always
done it. Let this be your reason for binding their trade. Do
not burden them by taxes; you were not used to do so from the
beginning. Let this be your reason for not taxing. These are
the arguments of states and kingdoms. Leave the rest to the
schools; for there only they may be discussed with safety.
But, if intemperately, unwisely, fatally, you sophisticate and
poison the very source of government, by urging subtle deductions,
and consequences odious to those you govern, from the
unlimited and illimitable nature of supreme sovereignty, you will
teach them by these means to call that sovereignty itself in
question. When you drive him hard, the boar will surely turn
upon the hunters. If that sovereignty and their freedom cannot
be reconciled, which will they take? They will cast your
sovereignty in your face. Nobody will be argued into slavery.
Sir, let the gentlemen on the other side call forth all their ability;
let the best of them get up, and tell me, what one character2
of liberty the Americans have, and what one brand of slavery
they are free from, if they are bound in their property and
industry, by all the restraints you can imagine on commerce,
and at the same time are made pack-horses of every tax you
choose to impose, without the least share in granting them.
When they bear the burdens of unlimited monopoly, will you
bring them to bear the burdens of unlimited revenue too? The
Englishman in America will feel that this is slavery — that it is
legal slavery will be no compensation, either to his feelings or
his understanding.
A noble lord,1 who spoke some time ago, is full of the fire of
ingenuous youth; and when he has modeled the ideas of a
lively imagination by further experience, he will be an ornament
to his country in either House. He has said, that the Americans
are our children, and how can they revolt against their parent?
He says, that if they are not free in their present state, England
is not free; because Manchester, and other considerable places,
are not represented. So then, because some towns in England
are not represented, America is to have no representative at all.
They are our children; but when children ask for bread, we are
not to give a stone. Is it because the natural resistance of
things, and the various mutations of time, hinder our government,
or any scheme of government, from being any more than
a sort of approximation to the right — is it therefore that the
colonies are to recede from it infinitely? When this child of
ours wishes to assimilate to its parent, and to reflect with a true
filial resemblance the beauteous countenance of British liberty;
are we to turn to them the shameful parts of our Constitution?
are we to give them our weakness for their strength? our opprobrium
for their glory? and the slough of slavery, which we
are not able to work off, to serve them for their freedom?
If this be the case, ask yourselves this question, Will they be
content in such a state of slavery? If not, look to the consequences.
Reflect how you are to govern a people, who think
they ought to be free, and think they are not. Your scheme
yields no revenue; it yields nothing but discontent, disorder,
disobedience; and such is the state of America, that after wading
up to your eyes in blood, you could only end just where you
begun; that is, to tax where no revenue is to be found, to — my
voice fails me; my inclination indeed carries me no farther — all
is confusion beyond it.
1 Burke, , edited by E. J. Payne. 2 vols. Oxford, 1890. Clarendon
Press.
2 Burke, , vol. i, pp. 154–156.
1 Psalm xxxiv, 14.
2I.e., mark or stamp.
1 Lord Carmarthen.
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Chicago: E. J. Payne, ed., "A Warning to Great Britain," Select Works in Readings in Modern European History, ed. Webster, Hutton (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1926), 130–131. Original Sources, accessed April 19, 2024, http://www.originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=SNQJXJ7HBRYKSJS.
MLA: . "A Warning to Great Britain." Select Works, edited by E. J. Payne, Vol. i, in Readings in Modern European History, edited by Webster, Hutton, Boston, D.C. Heath, 1926, pp. 130–131. Original Sources. 19 Apr. 2024. http://www.originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=SNQJXJ7HBRYKSJS.
Harvard: (ed.), 'A Warning to Great Britain' in Select Works. cited in 1926, Readings in Modern European History, ed. , D.C. Heath, Boston, pp.130–131. Original Sources, retrieved 19 April 2024, from http://www.originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=SNQJXJ7HBRYKSJS.
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