LETTER

ΤΟ

RICHARD BURKE, ESQ.

1040

MY DEAR SON,

WE 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 public. But being engaged in a great and critical work, I have not the least 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 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 certin 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 well understood private interest, to the false and ill calculated private interest of the monopolizing company they belong to. Eminent characters, to be sure, overrule places and circumstances. I have nothing to say to that virtue which shoots up in full force by the native vigour of the seminal principle, in spite of the adverse soil and climate that it grows in. But, speaking of things in their ordinary course, in a country of monopoly there can be no patriotism. There may be a party spirit-but public spirit there can be none. As to a spirit of liberty, still less can it exist, or any thing like it. A liberty made up of penalties! a liberty made up of incapacities! a li

berty made up of exclusion and proscription, continued for ages of four-fifths, perhaps, of the inhabitants of all ranks and fortunes! In what does such liberty differ from the description of the most shocking kind of servitude?

But it will be said, in that country some people are freewhy this is the very description of despotism. Partial freedom is privilege and prerogative, and not liberty. Liberty, such as deserves the name, is an honest, equitable, diffusive, and impartial principle. It is a great and enlarged virtue, and not a sordid, selfish, and illiberal vice. It is the portion of the mass of the citizens; and not the haughty license of some potent individual, or some predominant faction.

If any thing ought to be despotic in a country, it is its government; because there is no cause, of constant operation, to make its yoke unequal. But the dominion of a party must continually, steadily, and by its very essence, lean upon the pros trate description. A constitution formed so as to enable a party to overrule its very government, and to overpower the people too, answers the purposes neither of government nor of freedom. It compels that power, which ought, and often would be, disposed equally to protect the subjects, to fail in its trust, to counteract its purposes, and to become no better than the instrument of the wrongs of a faction. Some degree of influence must exist in all governments. But a government which has no interest to please the body of the people, and can neither support them, nor with safety call for their support, nor is of power to sway the domineering faction, can only exist by corruption; and taught by that monopolizing party which usurps the title and qualities of the public, to consider the body of the people as out of the constitution, they will consider those who are in it in the light in which they choose to consider themselves. The whole relation of government and of freedom will be a battle or a traffick.

This system, in its real nature, and under its proper appellations, is odious and unnatural, especially when a constitution is admitted, which not only, as all constitutions do profess, has a regard to the good of the multitude, but in its theory makes profession of their power also. But of late, this scheme of theirs has been new christened-honestum nomen imponitur vitio. A word has been lately struck in the mint of the castle of Dublin; thence it was conveyed to the Tholsel, or City-hall, where having passed the touch of the corporation, so respectably stamped and vouched, it soon became current in parliament, and was carried back by the speaker of the house of commons in great pomp, as an offering of homage from whence

it came. The word is ascendancy: It is not absolutely new. But the sense in which I have hitherto seen it used, was to signify an influence obtained over the minds of some other person by love and reverence, or by superior management and dexterity. It had, therefore, to this its promotion, no more than a moral, not a civil or political use. But I admit it is capable of being so applied; and if the lord mayor of Dublin, and the speaker of the Irish parliament, who recommend the preservation of the protestant ascendancy, mean to employ the word in that sense, that is, if they understand by it the preservation of the influence of that description of gentlemen over the catholics, by means of an authority derived from their wisdom and virtue, and from an opinion they raise in that people of a pious regard and affection for their freedom and happiness, it is impossible not to commend their adoption of so apt a term into the family of politics. It may be truly said to enrich the language. Even if the lord mayor and speaker mean to insinuate that this influence is to be obtained and held by flattering their people, by managing them by skilfully adapting themselves to the humours and passions of those whom they would govern, he must be a very untoward critic who would cavil even at this use of the word, though such cajoleries would perhaps be more prudently practised than professed. These are all meanings laudable, or at least tolerable. But when we look a little more narrowly, and compare it with the plan to which it owes its present technical application, I find it has strayed far from its original sense. It goes much further than the privilege allowed by Horace. It is more than parce detorsum. This protestant ascendancy means nothing less than an influence obtained by virtue, by love, or even by artifice and seduction; full as little an influence derived from the means by which ministers have obtained an influence, which might be called, without straining, an ascendancy in public assemblies in England, that is, by a liberal distribution of places and pensions and other graces of government. This last is wide indeed of the signification of the word. New ascendancy is the old mastership. It is neither more nor less than the resolution of one set of people in Ireland, to consider themselves as the sole citizens in the commonwealth; and to keep a dominion over the rest by reducing them to absolute slavery, under a military power; and thus fortified in their power, to divide the public estate, which is the result of general contribution, as a military booty, solely amongst themselves.

The poor word ascendancy, so soft and melodious in its sound, so lenitive and emollient in its first usage, is now em

ployed to cover to the world, the most rigid and perhaps not the most wise of all plans of policy. The word is large enough in its comprehension. I cannot conceive what mode of oppression in civil life, or what mode of religious persecution, may not come within the methods of preserving an ascendancy. In plain old English, as they apply it, it signifies pride and dominion on the one part of the relation, and on the other subserviency and contempt-and it signifies nothing else. The old words are as fit to be set to music as the new; but use has long since affixed to them their true signification, and they sound, as the other will, harshly and odiously to the moral and intelligent ears of mankind.

This ascendancy, by being a protestant ascendancy, does not better it from the combination of a note or two more in this anti-harmonic scale. If protestant ascendancy means the proscription from citizenship of by far the major part of the people of any country, then protestant ascendancy is a bad thing; and it ought to have no existence. But there is a deeper evil. By the use that is so frequently made of the term, and the policy which is engrafted on it, the name protestant becomes nothing more or better than the name of a persecuting faction, with a relation of some sort of theological hostility to others, but without any sort of ascertained tenets of its own, upon the ground of which it persecutes other men ; for the patrons of this protestant ascendancy neither do nor can, by any thing positive, define or describe what they mean by the word protestant. It is defined, as Cowley defines wit, not by what it is, but by what it is not. It is not the christian religion as professed in the churches holding communion with Rome, the majority of christians; that is all which in the latitude of the term is known about its signification. This makes such persecutors ten times worse than any of that description that hitherto have been known in the world. The old persecutors, whether pagan or christian, whether arian or orthodox, whether catholics, anglicans, or calvinists, actually were, or at least had the decorum to pretend to be, strong dogmatists. They pretended that their religious maxims were clear and ascertained, and so useful, that they were bound, for the eternal benefit of mankind, to defend or diffuse them, though by any sacrifices of the temporal good of those who were the objects of their system of experiment.

The bottom of this theory of persecution is false. It is not permitted to us to sacrifice the temporal good of any body of men to our own ideas of the truth and falsehood of any religious opinions. By making men miserable in this life, they counter