The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II | Page 2

agree with the honorable gentleman[1] who spoke last, that this
subject is not new in this House. Very disagreeably to this House, very
unfortunately to this nation, and to the peace and prosperity of this
whole empire, no topic has been more familiar to us. For nine long
years, session after session, we have been lashed round and round this
miserable circle of occasional arguments and temporary expedients. I
am sure our heads must turn and our stomachs nauseate with them. We
have had them in every shape; we have looked at them in every point of
view. Invention is exhausted; reason is fatigued; experience has given
judgment; but obstinacy is not yet conquered.
The honorable gentleman has made one endeavor more to diversify the
form of this disgusting argument. He has thrown out a speech
composed almost entirely of challenges. Challenges are serious things;
and as he is a man of prudence as well as resolution, I dare say he has
very well weighed those challenges before he delivered them. I had
long the happiness to sit at the same side of the House, and to agree
with the honorable gentleman on all the American questions. My
sentiments, I am sure, are well known to him; and I thought I had been
perfectly acquainted with his. Though I find myself mistaken, he will
still permit me to use the privilege of an old friendship; he will permit
me to apply myself to the House under the sanction of his authority,
and, on the various grounds he has measured out, to submit to you the
poor opinions which I have formed upon a matter of importance
enough to demand the fullest consideration I could bestow upon it.
He has stated to the House two grounds of deliberation: one narrow and
simple, and merely confined to the question on your paper; the other

more large and more complicated,--comprehending the whole series of
the Parliamentary proceedings with regard to America, their causes,
and their consequences. With regard to the latter ground, he states it as
useless, and thinks it may be even dangerous, to enter into so extensive
a field of inquiry. Yet, to my surprise, he had hardly laid down this
restrictive proposition, to which his authority would have given so
much weight, when directly, and with the same authority, he condemns
it, and declares it absolutely necessary to enter into the most ample
historical detail. His zeal has thrown him a little out of his usual
accuracy. In this perplexity, what shall we do, Sir, who are willing to
submit to the law he gives us? He has reprobated in one part of his
speech the rule he had laid down for debate in the other, and, after
narrowing the ground for all those who are to speak after him, he takes
an excursion, himself, as unbounded as the subject and the extent of his
great abilities.
Sir, when I cannot obey all his laws, I will do the best I can. I will
endeavor to obey such of them as have the sanction of his example, and
to stick to that rule which, though not consistent with the other, is the
most rational. He was certainly in the right, when he took the matter
largely. I cannot prevail on myself to agree with him in his censure of
his own conduct. It is not, he will give me leave to say, either useless or
dangerous. He asserts, that retrospect is not wise; and the proper, the
only proper subject of inquiry, is "not how we got into this difficulty,
but how we are to get out of it." In other words, we are, according to
him, to consult our invention, and to reject our experience. The mode
of deliberation he recommends is diametrically opposite to every rule
of reason and every principle of good sense established amongst
mankind. For that sense and that reason I have always understood
absolutely to prescribe, whenever we are involved in difficulties from
the measures we have pursued, that we should take a strict review of
those measures, in order to correct our errors, if they should be
corrigible,--or at least to avoid a dull uniformity in mischief, and the
unpitied calamity of being repeatedly caught in the same snare.
Sir, I will freely follow the honorable gentleman in his historical
discussion, without the least management for men or measures, further
than as they shall seem to me to deserve it. But before I go into that
large consideration, because I would omit nothing that can give the

House satisfaction, I wish to tread the narrow ground to which alone
the honorable gentleman, in one part of his speech, has so strictly
confined us.
He desires to know, whether, if we were to repeal this tax,