provocation. Remember the whole of 1781, and 1782-in Parliament and out of Parliament-at this very day, and in the worst acts and designs, observe the tenour of the objections, with which the College-green orators of the ascendency reproach the Catholicks. You have observed, no doubt, how much they rely on the affair of Jackson. Is it not pleasant to hear Catholicks reproached for a supposed connexion-with whom?-with Protestant Clergymen, with Protestant Gentlemen! with Mr. Jackson!-with Mr. Rowan, &c. &c.! But egomet mi ignosco. Conspiracies and treasons are privileged pleasures, not to be profaned by the impure and unhallowed touch of Papists. Indeed all this will do, perhaps, well enough with detachments of dismounted Cavalry and Fencibles from England. But let us not say to Catholicks, by way of argument, that they are to be kept in a degraded state, because some of them are no better than many of us Protestants. The thing I most disliked in some of their speeches (those I mean of the Catholicks) was what is called the spirit of liberality, so much and so diligently taught by the ascendants, by which they are made to abandon their own particular interests, and to merge them in the general discontents of the Country. It gave me no pleasure to hear of the dissolution of the Committee. There were in it a majority, to my knowledge, of very sober well-intentioned men; and there were none in it, but such, who, if not continually goaded

and irritated, might be made useful to the tranquillity of the Country. It is right always to have a few of every description, through whom you may quietly operate on the many, both for the interests of the description, and for the general interest. Excuse me, my dear friend, if I have a little tried your patience. You have brought this trouble on yourself, by your thinking of a man forgot, and who has no objection to be forgot, by the world. These things we discussed together four or five and thirty years ago. We were then, and at bottom ever since, of the same opinion on the justice and policy of the whole, and of every part, of the penal system. You and I, and every body, must now and then ply and bend to the occasion, and take what can be got. But very sure I am, that whilst there remains in the Law any principle whatever, which can furnish to certain politicians an excuse for raising an opinion of their own importance, as necessary to keep their fellow subjects in order, the obnoxious people will be fretted, harassed, insulted, provoked to discontent and disorder, and practically excluded from the partial advantages, from which the letter of the Law does not exclude them.

Adieu! my dear Sir, and believe me very truly

Beaconsfield, May 26 1795.

Your's, EDMUND BURKE

LETTER

ΤΟ

RICHARD BURKE, ESQ.

My dear Son,

WE

E 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 labour. 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 endeavour to render some more moderate, and less invidious, service to the Publick. But being engaged in a great and critical work, I have not the least hesitation

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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 favour lasted, you might have coined that false reputation into a true and solid interest to yourself. This you are well apprized 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

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.

I am sorry to find, that pride and passion, and that sort of zeal for religion, which never shows any wonderful heat but when it afflicts and mortifies our neighbour, will not let the ruling description perceive, that the privilege, for which your clients contend, is very nearly as much for the benefit of those, who refuse it, as those, who ask it. I am not to examine into the charges, that are daily made on the Administration of Ireland. I am not qualified to say how much in them is cold truth, and how much rhetorical exaggeration. Allowing some foundation to the complaint, it is to no purpose, that these people allege, that their Government is a job in its administration. I am sure it is a job in its constitution; nor is it possible, a scheme of polity, which in total exclusion of the body of the community confines (with little or no regard to their rank or condition in life) to a certain set of favoured citizens the rights, which formerly belonged to the whole, should not, by the operation of the same selfish and narrow principles, teach the persons, who administer in that Government, to prefer their own particular, but EE 4

well