The Portable Edmund Burke (Portable Library) (61 page)

Wishing to proceed with a deliberative spirit and temper in so very serious a question, I shall attempt to analyze, as well as I can, the principles you lay down, in order to fit them for the grasp of an understanding so little comprehensive as mine.—“State”—“Protestant”—“Revolution.” These are terms which, if not well explained, may lead us into many errors. In the word
State
I conceive there is much ambiguity. The state is sometimes used to signify
the whole commonwealth,
comprehending all its orders, with the several privileges belonging to each. Sometimes it signifies only
the higher and ruling part
of the commonwealth, which we commonly call
the Government.
In the first sense, to be under the state, but not the state itself,
nor any part of it,
that is, to be nothing at all in the commonwealth, is a situation perfectly intelligible—but to those who fill that situation, not very pleasant, when it is understood. It is a state
of civil servitude,
by the very force of the definition.... This servitude, which makes men
subject
to a state without being
citizens,
may be more or less tolerable from many circumstances; but these circumstances, more or less favorable, do not alter the nature of the thing. The mildness by which absolute masters exercise their dominion leaves them masters still....

In the other sense of the word
State,
by which is understood the
Supreme Government
only, I must observe this upon the question: that to exclude whole classes of men entirely from this
part
of government cannot be considered as
absolute slavery.
It only implies a lower and degraded state of citizenship: such is (with more or less strictness) the condition of all countries in which an hereditary nobility possess the exclusive rule. This may be no bad mode of government—provided that the personal authority of individual nobles be kept in due bounds, that their cabals and factions are guarded against with a severe vigilance, and that the people (who have no share in granting their own money) are subjected to but light impositions, and are otherwise treated with attention, and with indulgence to their humors and prejudices....

Between the extreme of
a total exclusion,
to which your maxim goes, and
an universal unmodified capacity,
to which the fanatics pretend, there are many different degrees and stages, and a great variety of temperaments, upon which prudence may give full scope to its exertions. For you know that the decisions of prudence (contrary to the system of the insane reasoners) differ from those of judicature; and that almost all the former are determined on the more or the less, the earlier or the later, and on a balance of advantage and inconvenience, of good and evil.

In all considerations which turn upon the question of vesting or continuing the state solely and exclusively in some one description of citizens, prudent legislators will consider how far
the general form and principles of their commonwealth render it fit to be cast into an oligarchical shape, or to remain always in it.
We know that the government of Ireland (the same as the British) is not in its constitution
wholly
aristocratical; and as it is not such in its form, so neither is it in its spirit. If it had been inveterately aristocratical, exclusions might be more patiently submitted to.The lot of one plebeian would be the lot of all; and an habitual reverence and admiration of certain families might make the people content to see government wholly in hands to whom it seemed naturally to belong. But our Constitution has a
plebeian member,
which forms an essential integrant part of it. A plebeian oligarchy is a monster; and no people, not absolutely domestic or predial slaves, will long endure it. The Protestants of Ireland are not
alone
sufficiently the people to form a democracy; and they are too
numerous
to answer the ends and purposes of
an aristocracy.
Admiration, that first source of obedience, can be only the claim or the imposture of the few. I hold it to be absolutely impossible for two millions of plebeians, composing certainly a very clear and decided majority in that class, to become so far in love with six or seven hundred thousand of their fellow-citizens (to all outward appearance plebeians like themselves, and many of them tradesmen, servants, and otherwise inferior to some of them) as to see with satisfaction, or even with patience, an exclusive power vested in them, by which
constitutionally
they become the absolute masters, and by the
manners
derived from their circumstances, must be capable of exercising upon them, daily and hourly, an insulting and vexatious superiority. Neither are the majority of the Irish indemnified (as in some aristocracies) for this state of humiliating vassalage (often inverting the nature of things and relations) by having the lower walks of industry wholly abandoned to them. They are rivalled, to say the least of the matter, in every laborious and lucrative course of life; while every franchise, every honor, every trust, every place, down to the very lowest and least confidential, (besides whole professions,) is reserved for the master caste.

Our Constitution is not made for great, general, and proscriptive exclusions; sooner or later it will destroy them, or they will destroy the Constitution. In our Constitution there has always been a difference between
a franchise
and
an office,
and between the capacity for the one and for the other. Franchises were supposed to belong to the
subject, as a subject,
and not
as a member of the governing part of the state.
The policy of government has considered them as things very different; for, whilst Parliament excluded by the test acts (and for a while these test acts were not a dead letter, as now they are in England) Protestant Dissenters from all civil and military employments, they
never touched their right of voting for members of Parliament or sitting in either House:
a point I state, not as approving or condemning, with regard to them, the measure of exclusion from employments, but to prove that the distinction has been admitted in legislature, as, in truth, it is founded in reason.

I will not here examine whether the principles of the British [the Irish] Constitution be wise or not. I must assume that they are, and that those who partake the franchises which make it partake of a benefit. They who are excluded from votes (under proper qualifications inherent in the Constitution that gives them) are excluded, not from
the state,
but from
the British Corutitution.
They cannot by any possibility, whilst they hear its praises continually rung in their ears, and are present at the declaration which is so generally and so bravely made by those who possess the privilege, that the best blood in their veins ought to be shed to preserve their share in it—they, the disfranchised part, cannot, I say, think themselves in an
happy
state, to be utterly excluded from all its direct and all its consequential advantages. The popular part of the Constitution must be to them by far the most odious part of it.To them it is not an
actual,
and, if possible, still less a virtual representation. It is, indeed, the direct contrary. It is power unlimited placed in the hands of
an adverse
description
because it is an adverse description.
And if they who compose the privileged body have not an interest, they must but too frequently have motives of pride, passion, petulance, peevish jealousy, or tyrannic suspicion, to urge them to treat the excluded people with contempt and rigor.

This is not a mere theory; though, whilst men are men, it is a theory that cannot be false....

This universal exclusion seems to me a serious evil—because many collateral oppressions ... have arisen from it....

I have said enough of the question of state,
as it affects the people merely as such.
But it is complicated with a political question relative to religion, to which it is very necessary I should say something—because the term
Protestant,
which you apply, is too general for the conclusions which one of your accurate understanding would wish to draw from it, and because a great deal of argument will depend on the use that is made of that term.

It is not a fundamental part of the settlement at the Revolution that the state should be Protestant
without any qualification of the term.
With a qualification it is unquestionably true; not in all its latitude. With the qualification, it was true before the Revolution. Our predecessors in legislation were not so irrational (not to say impious) as to form an operose ecclesiastical establishment, and even to render the state itself in some degree subservient to it, when their religion (if such it might be called) was nothing but a mere
negation
of some other—without any positive idea, either of doctrine, discipline, worship, or morals, in the scheme which they, professed themselves, and which they imposed upon others, even under penalties and incapacities. No! No! This never could have been done, even by reasonable atheists. They who think religion of no importance to the state have abandoned it to the conscience or caprice of the individual ... There never has been a religion of the state (the few years of the Parliament only excepted) but that of
the Episcopal Church of England:
the Episcopal Church of England, before the Reformation, connected with the see of Rome; since then, disconnected, and protesting against some of her doctrines, and against the whole of her authority, as binding in our national church: nor did the fundamental laws of this kingdom (in Ireland it has been the same) ever know, at any period, any other church
as an object of establishment
—or, in that light, any other Protestant religion. Nay, our Protestant
toleration
itself, at the Revolution, and until within a few years, required a signature of thirty-six, and a part of the thirty-seventh, out of the Thirty-Nine Articles. So little idea had they at the Revolution of
establishing
Protestantism indefinitely, that they did not indefinitely
tolerate
it under that name. I do not mean to praise that strictness, where nothing more than merely religious toleration is concerned. Toleration, being a part of moral and political prudence, ought to be tender and large....

For reasons forcible enough at all times, but at this time particularly forcible with me, I dwell a little the longer upon this matter, and take the more pains, to put us both in mind that it was not settled at the Revolution that the state should be Protestant, in the latitude of the term, but in a defined and limited sense only, and that in that sense only the king is sworn to maintain it.To suppose that the king has sworn with his utmost power to maintain what it is wholly out of his power to discover, or which, if he could discover, he might discover to consist of things directly contradictory to each other, some of them perhaps impious, blasphemous, and seditious upon principle, would be not only a gross, but a most mischievous absurdity. If mere dissent from the Church of Rome be a merit, he that dissents the most perfectly is the most meritorious. In many points we hold strongly with that church. He that dissents throughout with that church will dissent with the Church of England, and then it will be a part of his merit that he dissents with ourselves: a whimsical species of merit for any set of men to establish.... A man is certainly the most perfect Protestant who protests against the whole Christian religion. Whether a person’s having no Christian religion be a title to favor, in exclusion to the largest description of Christians, who hold all the doctrines of Christianity, though holding along with them some errors and some superfluities, is rather more than any man, who has not become recreant and apostate from his baptism, will, I believe, choose to affirm. The countenance given from a spirit of controversy to that negative religion may by degrees encourage light and unthinking people to a total indifference to everything positive in matters of doctrine, and, in the end, of practice too. If continued, it would play the game of that sort of active, proselytizing, and persecuting atheism which is the disgrace and calamity of our time....

Now let us fairly see what course has been taken relative to those against whom, in part at least, the king has sworn to maintain a church,
positive in its doctrine and its discipline.
The first thing done, even when the oath was fresh in the mouth of the sovereigns, was to give a toleration to Protestant Dissenters
whose doctrines they ascertained.
As to the mere civil privileges which the Dissenters held as subjects before the Revolution, these were not touched at all. The laws have fully permitted, in a qualification for all offices, to such Dissenters,
an occasional conformity:
a thing I believe singular, where tests are admitted. The act, called the Test Act, itself, is, with regard to them, grown to be hardly anything more than a dead letter. Whenever the Dissenters cease by their conduct to give any alarm to the government, in Church and State, I think it very probable that even this matter, rather disgustful than inconvenient to them, may be removed, or at least so modified as to distinguish the qualification to those offices which really
guide the state
from those which are
merely instrumental,
or that some other and better tests may be put in their place.

So far as to England. In Ireland you have outran us. Without waiting for an English example, you have totally, and without any modification whatsoever, repealed the test as to Protestant Dissenters....

By this unqualified repeal you certainly did not mean to deny that it was the duty of the crown to preserve the Church against Protestant Dissenters; or taking this to be the true sense of the two Revolution acts of King William, and of the previous and subsequent Union acts of Queen Anne, you did not declare by this most unqualified repeal, by which you broke down all the barriers, not invented, indeed, but carefully preserved, at the Revolution—you did not then and by that proceeding declare that you had advised the king to perjury towards God and perfidy towards the Church. No! far, very far from it! You never would have done it, if you did not think it could be done with perfect repose to the royal conscience, and perfect safety to the national established religion. You did this upon a full consideration of the circumstances of your country. Now, if circumstances required it, why should it be contrary to the king’s oath, his Parliament judging on those circumstances, to restore to his Catholic people, in such measure and with such modifications as the public wisdom shall think proper to add,
some part
in these franchises which they formerly had held without any limitation at all, and which, upon no sort of urgent reason at the time, they were deprived of? If such means can with any probability be shown, from circumstances, rather to add strength to our mixed ecclesiastical and secular Constitution than to weaken it, surely they are means infinitely to be preferred to penalties, incapacities, and proscriptions, continued from generation to generation. They are perfectly consistent with the other parts of the coronation oath, in which the king swears to maintain “the laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel, and to govern the people according to the statutes in Parliament agreed upon, and the laws and customs of the realm.” In consenting to such a statute, the crown would act at least as agreeable to the laws of God, and to the true profession of the Gospel, and to the laws and customs of the kingdom....