IMPEACHMENT OF HASTINGS FINISHED. 175 My Lords, at this awful close, in the name of the Commons, and surrounded by them, I attest the retiring, I attest the advancing generations, between which, as a link in the great chain of eternal order, we stand. We call this nation, we call the world to witness, that the Commons have shrunk from no labour, that we have been guilty of no prevarication, that we have made no compromise with crime, that we have not feared any odium whatsoever, in the long warfare which we have carried on with the crimes, with the vices, with the exorbitant wealth, with the enormous and overpowering influence of Eastern corruption. This war we have waged for twenty-two years, and the conflict has been fought at your Lordships' bar for the last seven years. My Lords, twenty-two years is a great space in the scale of the life of man; it is no inconsiderable space in the history of a great nation. A business which has so long occupied the councils and the tribunals of Great Britain cannot possibly be huddled over in the course of vulgar, trite, and transitory events. Nothing but some of those great revolutions that break the traditionary chain of human memory, and alter the very face of Nature itself, can possibly obscure it. My Lords, we are all elevated to a degree of importance by it; the meanest of us will, by means of it, more or less become the concern of posterity, if we are yet to hope for such a thing, in the present state of the world, as a recording, retrospective, civilized posterity: but this is in the hands of the great Disposer of events; it is not ours to settle how it shall be. My Lords, your House yet stands, it stands as a great edifice; but let me say that it stands in the midst of ruins, in the midst of the ruins that have been made by the greatest moral earthquake that ever convulsed and shattered this globe of ours. My Lords, it has pleased Providence to place us in such a state, that we appear every moment to be upon the verge of some great mutations. There is one thing, and one thing only, which defies all mutation, that which existed before the world, and will survive the fabric of the world itself: I mean justice, that justice which, emanating from the Divinity, has a place in the breast of every one of us, given us for our guide with regard to ourselves and with regard to others, and which will stand, after this globe is burned to ashes, our advocate or accuser before the great Judge. My Lords, the Commons will share in every fate with your Lordships; there is nothing sinister which can happen to you, in which we shall not be involved. And if it should so happen that we shall be subjected to some of those frightful changes which we have seen; if it should happen that your Lordships, stripped of all the decorous distinctions of human society, should, by hands at once base and cruel, be led to those scaffolds and machines of murder upon which great kings and glorious queens have shed their blood, amidst the prelates, amidst the nobles, amidst the magistrates who supported their thrones, may you, in those moments, feel that consolation which I am persuaded they felt in the critical moments of their dreadful agony ! My Lords, there is a consolation, and a great consolation it is! - which often happens to oppressed virtue and fallen dignity. It often happens that the very oppressors and persecutors themselves are forced to bear testimony in its favour. I do not like to go for instances a great way back into antiquity. I know very well that length of time operates so as to give an air of the fabulous to remote events, which lessens the interest and weakens the application of examples. I wish to come nearer the present time. Your Lordships know and have heard (for which of us has not known and heard?) of the Parliament of Paris. The Parliament of Paris had an origin very, very similar to that of the great Court before which I stand; the Parliament of Paris continued to have a great resemblance to it in its constitution, even to its fall. The Parliament of Paris, my Lords, was; it is gone! It has passed away; it has vanished like a dream! It fell, pierced by the sword of the Comte de Mirabeau. And yet I will say that that man, at the time of his inflicting the death-wound of that Parliament, produced at once the shortest and the grandest funeral oration that ever was or could be made upon the departure of a great court of magistracy. Though he had himself smarted under its lash, as every one knows who knows his history, (and he was elevated to dreadful notoriety in history,) yet, when he pronounced the deathsentence upon that Parliament, and inflicted the mortal wound, he declared that his motives for doing it were merely political, and that their hands were as pure as those of justice itself, which they administered. A great and glorious exit, my Lords, of a great and glorious body! And never was an eulogy pronounced upon a body more BURKE ON THE DEATH OF HIS SON. 177 deserved. They were persons, in nobility of rank, in amplitude of fortune, in weight of authority, in depth of learning, inferior to few of those that hear me. My Lords, it was but the other day that they submitted their necks to the axe; but their honour was unwounded. Their enemies, the persons who sentenced them to death, were lawyers full of subtlety, they were enemies full of malice; yet, lawyers full of subtlety, and enemies full of malice, as they were, they did not dare to reproach them with having supported the wealthy, the great, and powerful, and of having oppressed the weak and feeble, in any of their judgments, or of having perverted justice, in any one instance whatever, through favour, through interest, or cabal. - My Lords, if you must fall, may you so fall! But if you stand, -and stand I trust you will, together with the fortune of this ancient monarchy, together with the ancient laws and liberties of this great and illustrious kingdom, may you stand as unimpeached in honour as in power! May you stand, not as a substitute for virtue, but as an ornament of virtue, as a security for virtue! May you stand long, and long stand the terror of tyrants! May you stand the refuge of afflicted nations! May you stand a sacred temple, for the perpetual residence of an inviolable justice ! EDMUND BURKE: 1794. BURKE ON THE DEATH OF HIS SON. HAD it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succession, I should have been, according to my mediocrity, and the mediocrity of the age I live in, a sort of founder of a family: I should have left a son who, in all the points in which personal merit can be viewed, in science, in erudition, in genius, in taste, in honour, in generosity, in humanity, in every liberal sentiment and every liberal accomplishment, would not have shown himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford, or to any of those whom he traces in his line. His Grace very soon would have wanted all plausibility in his attack upon that provision which belonged more to mine than to me. HE would soon have supplied every deficiency, and symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have been for that successor to resort to any stagnant wasting reservoir of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient, living spring of generous and manly action. Every day he lived he would have re-purchased the bounty of the Crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he had received. He was made a public creature, and had no enjoyment whatever but in the performance of some duty. At this exigent moment the loss of a finished man is not easily supplied. me. But a Disposer whose power we are little able to resist, and whose wisdom it behoves us not at all to dispute, has ordained it in another manner, and (whatever my querulous weakness might suggest) a far better. The storm has gone over me; and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about I am stripped of all my honours, I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth! There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly recognize the Divine justice, and in some degree submit to it. But, whilst I humble myself before God, I do not know that it is forbidden to repel the attacks of unjust and inconsiderate men. The patience of Job is proverbial. After some of the convulsive struggles of our irritable nature, he submitted himself, and repented in dust and ashes. But even so, I do not find him blamed for reprehending, and with a considerable degree of verbal asperity, those ill-natured neighbours of his who visited his dunghill to read moral, political, and economical lectures on his misery. I am alone. I have none to meet my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my Lord, I greatly deceive myself, if in this hard season I would give a peck of refuse wheat for all that is called fame and honour in the world. This is the appetite but of a few. It is a luxury, it is a privilege, it is an indulgence for those who are at their ease. But we are all of us made to shun disgrace, as we are made to shrink from pain and poverty and disease. It is an instinct; and, under the direction of reason, instinct is always in the right. I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me are gone before me. They who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors. I owe to the dearest relation (which ever must subsist in memory) that act of piety which he would have performed to me, I owe it to him to show that he was not descended, as the Duke of Bedford would have it, from an unworthy parent. LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD: 1796. AN APPEAL TO THE HOUSE OF LORDS. 179 AN APPEAL TO THE HOUSE OF LORDS. SHALL I, my Lords, be deprived of all that is valuable to an Englishman (for in the circumstances to which I am to be reduced life itself is scarce valuable) by such an evidence as this? such an evidence as would not be admitted in any other cause, in any other court; nor allowed, I verily believe, to condemn a Jew in the Inquisitions of Spain or Portugal: shall it be received against me, a member of this House, in a charge of high treason brought in the High Court of Parliament? God forbid ! Doubtless the Legislature is without bounds. It may do what it pleases; and whatever it does is binding. Nay, in some respects it has greater power (with reverence be it spoken) than the Sovereign Legislator of the Universe; for He can do nothing unjustly! But though no limits can be set to Parliaments, yet they have generally thought fit to prescribe limits to themselves; and so to guide even their proceedings by bill in criminal cases, as to depart as little as possible from the known laws and usages of the realm. The Parliament may, if it pleases, by a particular Act, order a criminal to be tortured who will not confess; for who shall gainsay them? But they never did it; nor, I presume, ever will; because torture, though practised in other countries, is unknown in ours, and repugnant to the temper and genius of our mild and free government. And yet, my Lords, it looks, methinks, somewhat like torture, to inflict grievous pains and penalties on a person only suspected of guilt, but not legally proved guilty, in order to extort some confession or discovery from him. This, in other countries, is called putting to the question; and it matters not much by what engines or method such an experiment is made. The Parliament may, if it pleases, by an express law adjudge a man to absolute perpetual imprisonment, as well as to perpetual exile; without reserving to the Crown any power of terminating such imprisonment. They have enacted the one; I find not they ever enacted the other. And the reason seems to have been, because our law, which above all others provides for the liberty of the subject's person, knows nothing of such absolute perpetual imprisonment. The Parliament may in like manner condemn a man upon a charge of accumulative and constructive treason. They did so once, |