The American Union Speaker Part 21

Cx.x.xVII.

INVECTIVE AGAINST MR. FLOOD.

It is not the slander of an evil tongue that can defame me. I maintain my reputation in public and in private life. No man who has not a bad character can ever say that I deceived; no country can call me cheat. But I will suppose such a public character. I will suppose such a man to have existence. I will begin with his character in its political cradle, and I will follow him to the last state of political dissolution. I will suppose him, in the first stage of his life, to have been intemperate; in the second, to have been corrupt; and in the last, seditious; that after an envenomed attack upon the persons and measures of a succession of viceroys, and after much declamation against their illegalities and their profusion, he took office, and became a supporter of government when the profusion of ministers had greatly increased, and their crimes multiplied beyond example. At such a critical moment, I will suppose this gentleman to be corrupted by a great sinecure office to muzzle his declamation, to swallow his invective, to give his a.s.sent and vote to the ministers, and to become a supporter of government, its measures, its embargo, and its American war.

I will suppose, that with respect to the Const.i.tution of his country that part, for instance, which regarded the Mutiny Bill, when a clause of reference was introduced, whereby the articles of war, which were, or hereafter might be, pa.s.sed in England, should be current in Ireland without the interference of Parliament--when such a clause was in view, I will suppose this gentleman to have absconded. Again, when the bill was made perpetual, I will suppose him again to have absconded; but a year and a half after the bill had pa.s.sed then I will suppose this gentleman to have come forward, and to say that your Const.i.tution had been destroyed by the Perpetual Bill.

With respect to commerce, I will suppose this gentleman to have supported an embargo which lay on the country for three years, and almost destroyed it; and when an address in 1778, to open her trade, was propounded, to remain silent and inactive. In relation to three fourths of our fellow-subjects, the Catholics, when a bill was introduced to grant them rights of property and religion, I will suppose this gentleman to have come forth to give his negative to their pretensions.

With regard to the liberties of America, which were inseparable from ours, I will suppose this gentleman to have been an enemy, decided and unreserved; that he voted against her liberty, and voted, moreover, for an address to send four thousand Irish troops to cut the throats of the Americans; that he called these butchers "armed negotiators," and stood with a metaphor in his mouth, and a bribe in his pocket, a champion against the rights of America, the only hope of Ireland, and the only refuge of the liberties of mankind. Thus defective in every relationship, whether to Const.i.tution, commerce, or toleration, I will suppose this man to have added much private improbity to public crimes; that his probity was like his patriotism, and his honor on a level with his oath.

He loves to deliver panegyrics on himself. I will interrupt him, and say, "Sir, you are mistaken if you think that your talents have been as great as your life has been reprehensible. You began your parliamentary career with an acrimony and personality which could have been justified only by a supposition of virtue. After a rank and clamorous opposition you became, on a sudden, silent; you were silent for seven years; you were silent on the greatest questions; and you were silent for money! You supported the unparalleled profusion and jobbing of Lord Harcourt's scandalous ministry--the address to support the American war--the other address to send four thousand men, which you had yourself declared to be necessary for the defence of Ireland, to fight against the liberties of America, to which you had declared yourself a friend. You, sir, who manufacture stage-thunder against Mr. Eden for his anti-American principles--you, sir, whom it pleases to chant a hymn to the immortal Hampden--you, sir, approved of the tyranny exercised against America; and you, sir, voted four thousand Irish troops to cut the throats of the Americans fighting for their freedom, fighting for your freedom, fighting for the great principle, Liberty! But you found, at last (and this should be an eternal lesson to men of your craft and cunning), that the King; had only dishonored you; the court had bought, but would not trust you; and, having voted for the worst measures, you remained, for seven years, the creature of salary, without the conscience of government. Mortified at the discovery, and stung by disappointment, you betake yourself to the sad expedients of duplicity. You try the sorry game of a trimmer in your progress to the acts of an incendiary. You give no honest support either to the government or the people; observing, with regard to both prince and people, the most impartial treachery and desertion, you justify the suspicion of your Sovereign, by betraying the government, as you had sold the people, until, at last, by this hollow conduct, and for some other steps, the result of mortified ambition, being dismissed, and another person put in your place, you fly to the ranks of the Volunteers and canvas, for mutiny.

"Such has been your conduct; and at such conduct every order of your fellow-subjects have a right to exclaim! The merchant may say to you--the const.i.tutionality may say to you--the American may say to you--and I, I now say, and say to your beard, sir,--'you are not an honest man!'"

H. Gratton.

Cx.x.xVIII.

GRATTAN'S REPLY TO MR. CORRY.

Has the gentleman done? Has he completely done? He was unparliamentary from the beginning to the end of his speech. There was scarce a word he uttered that was not a violation of the privileges of the House. But I did not call him to order, why? because the limited talents of some men render it impossible for them to be severe without being unparliamentary. But before I sit down, I shall show him how to be severe and parliamentary at the same time.

On any other occasion, I should think myself justifiable in treating with silent contempt anything which might fall from that honorable member; but there are times, when the insignificance of the accuser is lost in the magnitude of the accusation. I know the difficulty the honorable gentleman labored under when he attacked me, conscious that, on a comparative view of our characters, public and private, there is nothing he could say which would injure me. The public would not believe the charge. I despise the falsehood. If such a charge were made by an honest man, I would answer it in the manner I shall do before I sit down. But I shall first reply to it when not made by an honest man.

The right honorable gentleman has called me "an unimpeached traitor." I ask why not "traitor," unqualified by any epithet? I will tell him; it was because he durst not. It was the act of a coward, who raises his arm to strike, but has not courage to give the blow. I will not call him villain, because it would be unparliamentary, and he is a privy counsellor. I will not call him fool, because he happens to be chancellor of the exchequer.

But I say he is one who has abused the privilege of Parliament, and the freedom of debate, by uttering language, which, if spoken out of the House, I should answer only with a blow. I care not how high his situation, how low his character, how contemptible his speech; whether a privy counsellor or a parasite, my answer would be a blow.

He has charged me with being connected with the rebels. The charge is utterly, totally and meanly false. Does the honorable gentleman rely on the report of the House of Lords for the foundation of his a.s.sertion? If he does, I can prove to the committee there was a physical impossibility of that report being true. But I scorn to answer any man for my conduct, whether he be a political c.o.xcomb, or whether he brought himself into power by a false glare of courage or not.

I have returned, not as the right honorable member has said, to raise another storm--I have returned to discharge an honorable debt of grat.i.tude to my country, that conferred a great reward for past services, which, I am proud to say, was not greater than my desert. I have returned to protect that Const.i.tution, of which I was the parent and founder, from the a.s.sa.s.sination of such men as the right honorable gentleman and his unworthy a.s.sociates. They are corrupt,--they are seditious,--and they, at this very moment, are in a conspiracy against their country. I have returned to refute a libel, as false as it is malicious, given to the public under the appellation of a report of the committee of the Lords. Here I stand ready for impeachment or trial. I dare accusation. I defy the honorable gentleman; I defy the government; I defy their whole phalanx; let them come forth. I tell the ministers, I will neither give quarter nor take it. I am here to lay the shattered remains of my const.i.tution on the floor of this House, in defence of the liberties of my country.

Cx.x.xIX.

SPEECH OF t.i.tUS QUINCTIUS TO THE ROMANS.

You have seen it--posterity will know it! in the fourth consulship of t.i.tus Quinctius, our enemies came in arms, to the very gates of Rome,--and went away unchastised! But who are they that our dastardly enemies thus despise?--the consuls, or you, Romans? If we are in fault, depose us, or punish us yet more severely. If you are to blame--may neither G.o.ds nor men punish your faults! only may you repent!--No, Romans, the confidence of our enemies is not owing to their courage, or to their belief of your cowardice; they have been too often vanquished, not to know both themselves and you. Discord, discord is the ruin of this city! The eternal disputes, between the senate and the people, are the sole cause of our misfortunes.

While we set no bounds to our dominion, nor you to your liberty; while you impatiently endure Patrician magistrates, and we Plebeian; our enemies take heart, grow elated, and presumptuous. In the name of the immortal G.o.ds, what is it, Romans, you would have? You desired Tribunes; for the sake of peace, we granted them. You were eager to have Decemvirs; we consented to their creation. You grew weary of these Decemvirs; we obliged them to abdicate. Your hatred pursued them when reduced to private men; and we suffered you to put to death, or banish, Patricians of the first rank in the republic. You insisted upon the restoration of the Tribuneship; we yielded; we quietly saw Consuls of your own faction elected. You have the protection of your Tribunes, and the privilege of appeal; the Patricians are subjected to the decrees of the Commons. Under pretence of equal and impartial laws, you have invaded our rights; and we have suffered it, and we still suffer it. When shall we see an end of discord? When shall we have one interest, and one common country? Victorious and triumphant, you show less temper than we, under defeat. When you are to contend with us, you can seize the Aventine hill, you can possess yourselves of the Mons Sacer.

The enemy is at our gates,--the aesquiline is near being taken,--and n.o.body stirs to hinder it! But against us you are valiant, against us you can arm with diligence. Come on, then, besiege the senate-house, make a camp of the forum, fill the jails with our chief n.o.bles, and when you have achieved these glorious exploits, then, at last, sally out at the aesquiline gate, with the same fierce spirits, against the enemy. Does your resolution fail you for this? Go then, and behold from our walls your lands ravaged, your houses plundered and in flames, the whole country laid waste with fire and sword. Have you anything here to repair these damages? Will the Tribunes make up your losses to you? They will give you words as many as you please; bring impeachments in abundance against the prime men in the State; heap laws upon laws; a.s.semblies you shall have without end; but will any of you return the richer from these a.s.semblies? Extinguish, O Romans, these fatal divisions; generously break this cursed enchantment, which keeps you buried in a scandalous inaction. Open your eyes and consider the management of those ambitious men, who, to make themselves powerful in their party, study nothing but how they may foment divisions in the commonwealth.

CXL.

THE BOSTON Ma.s.sACRE.

Tell me, ye b.l.o.o.d.y butchers! ye villains high and low! ye wretches who contrived, as well as you who executed, the inhuman deed! do you not feel the goads and stings of conscious guilt pierce through your savage bosoms?

Though some of you may think yourselves exalted to such a height that bids defiance to the arms of human justice, and others shroud yourselves beneath the mask of hypocrisy, and build your hopes of safety on the low arts of cunning, chicanery, and falsehood; yet do you not sometimes feel the gnawings of that worm which never dies? Do not the injured shades of Maverick, Gray, Caldwell, Attucks, and Carr, attend you in your solitary walks, arrest you even in the midst of your debaucheries, and fill even your dreams with terror?

Ye dark, designing knaves! ye murderers! parricides! how dare you tread upon the earth which has drank in the blood of slaughtered innocents, shed by your wicked hands? How dare you breathe that air which wafted to the ear of Heaven the groans of those who fell a sacrifice to your accursed ambition? But, if the laboring earth does not expand her jaws; if the air you breathe is not commissioned to be the minister of death; yet hear it, and tremble! the eye of Heaven penetrates the darkest chambers of the soul; traces the leading clew through all the labyrinths which your industrious folly has devised; and you, however you may have screened yourselves from human eyes, must be arraigned, must lift your hands, red with the blood of those whose deaths you have procured, at the tremendous bar of G.o.d.

John Hanc.o.c.k.

CXLI.

ENTERPRISE OF NEW ENGLAND.

As to the wealth, Mr. Speaker, which the colonies have drawn from the sea by their fisheries, you had all that matter fully opened at your bar. You surely thought those acquisitions of value; for they seemed even to excite your envy; and yet the spirit by which that enterprising employment has been exercised, ought rather, in my opinion, to have raised your esteem and admiration. And pray, sir, what in the world is equal to it? Pa.s.s by the other parts, and look at the manner in which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale fishery. Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson's Bay and Davis's Straits, whilst we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen serpent of the south. Falkland island, which seemed too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of their victorious industry.

Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the acc.u.mulated winter of both the poles. We know that whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude, and pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not witness to their toils.

Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise, ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people; a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

When I contemplate these things; when I know that the colonies in general owe little or nothing to any care of ours, and that they are not squeezed into this happy form by the constrains of watchful and suspicious government, but that through a wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suffered to take her own way to perfection; when I reflect upon these effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away within me. My rigor relents. I pardon something to the spirit of liberty.

E. Burke.

CXLII.

THE RIGHT OF ENGLAND TO TAX AMERICA.

But Mr. Speaker, "we have a right to tax America." Oh, inestimable right!

Oh, wonderful, transcendent right! the a.s.sertion of which has cost this country thirteen provinces, six islands, one hundred thousand lives, and seventy millions of money. Oh, invaluable right! for the sake of which we have sacrificed our rank among nations, our importance abroad, and our happiness at home! Oh, right! more dear to us than our existence, which has already cost us so much, and which seems likely to cost us our all.

Infatuated man! Miserable and undone country! not to know that the claim of right, without the power of enforcing it, is nugatory and idle. We have a right to tax America, the n.o.ble lord tells us therefore we ought to tax America. This is the profound logic which comprises the whole chain of his reasoning.

Not inferior to this was the wisdom of him who resolved to shear the wolf.

What, shear a wolf! Have you considered the resistance, the difficulty, the danger of the attempt? No, says the madman, I have considered nothing but the right. Man has a right of dominion over the beasts of the forest; and therefore I will shear the wolf.

How wonderful that a nation could be thus deluded! But the n.o.ble lord deals in cheats and delusions. They are the daily traffic of his invention; and he will continue to play to his cheats on this House, so long as he thinks them necessary to his purpose, and so long as he has money enough at command to bribe gentlemen to pretend that they believe him. But a black and bitter day of reckoning will surely come; and whenever that day comes, I trust I shall be able, by a parliamentary impeachment, to bring upon the heads of the authors of our calamities the punishment they deserve.

E. Burke.

CXLIII.

DESCRIPTION OF JUNIUS.

Sir,--How comes this Junius to have broken through the cobwebs of the law, and to range uncontrolled, unpunished, through the land? The myrmidons of the court have been long, and are still pursuing him in vain. They will not spend their time upon me, or you, or you. No! they disdain such vermin, when the mighty boar of the forest, that has broken through all their toils, is before them. But what will all their efforts avail? No sooner has he wounded one than he lays down another dead at his feet. For my part, when I saw his attack upon the king, I own my blood ran cold. I thought he had ventured too far, and there was an end of his triumphs. Not that he had not a.s.serted many truths:--Yes, sir, there are in that composition many bold truths, by which a wise prince might profit. It was the rancor and venom, with which I was struck. In these aspects the North-Briton is as much inferior to him, as in strength, wit, and judgment.

But while I expected, in this daring flight, his final ruin and fall, behold him rising still higher, and coming down souse upon both Houses of Parliament. Yes, he did make you his quarry, and you still bleed from the wounds of his talons. You crouched, and still crouch, beneath his rage. Nor has he dreaded the terrors of your brow, sir; he has attacked even you--he has--and I believe you have no reason to triumph in the encounter. In short, after carrying away our royal eagle in his pounces, and dashing him against a rock, he has laid you prostrate. King, lords and commons, are but the sport of his fury.

Were he a member of this House, what might not be expected from his knowledge, his firmness, and integrity? He would be easily known by his contempt of all danger, by his penetration, by his vigor. Nothing would escape his vigilance and activity. Bad ministers could conceal nothing from his sagacity; nor could promises nor threats induce him to conceal anything from the public.

E. Burke.

CXLIV.

TRUE STATESMANSHIP.

The true lawgiver ought to have a heart full of sensibility. He ought to love and respect his kind, and to fear himself. It may be allowed to his temperament to catchy his ultimate object with an intuitive glance, but his movements toward it ought to be deliberate. Political arrangement, as it is a work for social ends, is to be wrought only by social means. There mind must conspire with mind. Time is required to produce all the good we aim at. Our patience will achieve more than our force. If I might venture to appeal to what is so much out of fashion in Paris, I mean to experience, I should tell you that in my course I have known, and, according to my measure, have cooperated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in business. By a slow but well-sustained progress the effect of each step is watched; the good or ill success of the first gives light to us in the second; and so, from light to light, we are conducted with safety through the whole series.