This has surely much more the air of a table of proscription than an act of grace. What must we suppose the laws concerning those
good
subjects to have been of which this is a relaxation? I know well that there is a cant language current about the difference between an exclusion from employments, even to the most rigorous extent, and an exclusion from the natural benefits arising from a man’s own industry. I allow that, under some circumstances, the difference is very material in point of justice, and that there are considerations which may render it advisable for a wise government to keep the leading parts of every branch of civil and military administration in hands of the best trust; but a total exclusion from the commonwealth is a very different thing. When a government subsists (as governments formerly did) on an estate of its own, with but few and inconsiderable revenues drawn from the subject, then the few officers which existed in such establishments were naturally at the disposal of that government, which paid the salaries out of its own coffers: there an exclusive preference could hardly merit the name of proscription. Almost the whole produce of a man’s industry at that time remained in his own purse to maintain his family. But times alter, and the
whole
estate of government is from private contribution. When a very great portion of the labor of individuals goes to the state, and is by the state again refunded to individuals, through the medium of offices, and in this circuitous progress from the private to the public, and from the public again to the private fund, the families from whom the revenue is taken are indemnified, and an equitable balance between the government and the subject is established. But if a great body of the people who contribute to this state lottery are excluded from all the prizes, the stopping the circulation with regard to them may be a most cruel hardship, amounting in effect to being double and treble taxed; and it will be felt as such to the very quick, by all the families, high and low, of those hundreds of thousands who are denied their chance in the returned fruits of their own industry. This is the thing meant by those who look upon the public revenue only as a spoil, and will naturally wish to have as few as possible concerned in the division of the booty. If a state should be so unhappy as to think it cannot subsist without such a barbarous proscription, the persons so proscribed ought to be indemnified by the remission of a large part of their taxes, by an immunity from the offices of public burden, and by an exemption from being pressed into any military or naval service.
... This hardship is the more intolerable because the professions are shut up. The Church is so of course. Much is to be said on that subject, in regard to them, and to the Protestant Dissenters. But that is a chapter by itself. I am sure I wish well to that Church, and think its ministers among the very best citizens of your country. However, such as it is, a great walk in life is forbidden ground to seventeen hundred thousand of the inhabitants of Ireland. Why are they excluded from the law? Do not they expend money in their suits? Why may not they indemnify themselves, by profiting, in the persons of some, for the losses incurred by others? Why may not they have persons of confidence, whom they may, if they please, employ in the agency of their affairs? The exclusion from the law, from grand juries, from sheriffships and under-sheriffships, as well as from freedom in any corporation, may subject them to dreadful hardships, as it may exclude them wholly from all that is beneficial and expose them to all that is mischievous in a trial by jury. This was manifestly within my own observation, for I was three times in Ireland from the year 1760 to the year 1767, where I had sufficient means of information concerning the inhuman proceedings (among which were many cruel murders, besides an infinity of outrages and oppressions unknown before in a civilized age) which prevailed during that period, in consequence of a pretended conspiracy among
Roman Catholics
against the king’s government. I could dilate upon the mischiefs that may happen, from those which have happened, upon this head of disqualification, if it were at all necessary.
The head of exclusion from votes for members of Parliament is closely connected with the former. When you cast your eye on the statute-book, you will see that no
Catholic,
even in the ferocious acts of Queen Anne, was disabled from voting on account of his religion. The only conditions required for that privilege were the oaths of allegiance and abjuration—both oaths relative to a civil concern. Parliament has since added another oath of the same kind; and yet a House of Commons, adding to the securities of government in proportion as its danger is confessedly lessened, and professing both confidence and indulgence, in effect takes away the privilege left by an act full of jealousy and professing persecution.
The taking away of a vote is the taking away the shield which the subject has, not only against the oppression of power, but that worst of all oppressions, the persecution of private society and private manners. No candidate for parliamentary influence is obliged to the least attention towards them, either in cities or counties. On the contrary, if they should become obnoxious to any bigoted or malignant people amongst whom they live, it will become the interest of those who court popular favor to use the numberless means which always reside in magistracy and influence to oppress them.... The Protestants of Ireland feel well and naturally on the hardship of being bound by laws in the enacting of which they do not directly or indirectly vote. The bounds of these matters are nice, and hard to be settled in theory, and perhaps they have been pushed too far. But how they can avoid the necessary application of the principles they use in their disputes with others to their disputes with their fellow-citizens, I know not....
The laws against foreign education are clearly the very worst part of the old code. Besides your laity, you have the succession of about four thousand clergymen to provide for.These, having no lucrative objects in prospect, are taken very much out of the lower orders of the people. At home they have no means whatsoever provided for their attaining a clerical education, or indeed any education at all....
It has been the custom of poor persons in Ireland to pick up such knowledge of the Latin tongue as, under the general discouragements, and occasional pursuits of magistracy, they were able to acquire; and receiving orders at home, were sent abroad to obtain a clerical education. By officiating in petty chaplainships, and performing now and then certain offices of religion for small gratuities, they received the means of maintaining themselves until they were able to complete their education. Through such difficulties and discouragements, many of them have arrived at a very considerable proficiency, so as to be marked and distinguished abroad. These persons afterwards, by being sunk in the most abject poverty, despised and ill-treated by the higher orders among Protestants, and not much better esteemed or treated even by the few persons of fortune of their own persuasion, and contracting the habits and ways of thinking of the poor and uneducated, among whom they were obliged to live, in a few years retained little or no traces of the talents and acquirements which distinguished them in the early periods of their lives. Can we with justice cut them off from the use of places of education founded for the greater part from the economy of poverty and exile, without providing something that is equivalent at home?
Whilst this restraint of foreign and domestic education was part of a horrible and impious system of servitude, the members were well fitted to the body. To render men patient under a deprivation of all the rights of human nature, everything which could give them a knowledge or feeling of those rights was rationally forbidden. To render humanity fit to be insulted, it was fit that it should be degraded. But when we profess to restore men to the capacity for property, it is equally irrational and unjust to deny them the power of improving their minds as well as their fortunes. Indeed, I have ever thought the prohibition of the means of improving our rational nature to be the worst species of tyranny that the insolence and perverseness of mankind ever dared to exercise. This goes to all men, in all situations, to whom education can be denied....
Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe
After the French Revolution, Burke’s interest in the full emancipation of the Catholics in Ireland took on a new dimension. Added to the justice of their cause was Burke’s concern that continued discrimination would drive Irish Catholics
into the camp of revolutionary France. He makes this
political
case in a pamphlet-length letter
written
in January 1792 to a fellow member of Parliament.
IN MY PRESENT STATE of imperfect information, you will pardon the errors into which I may easily fall. The principles you lay down are, “that the Roman Catholics should enjoy everything under the state, but should not be the state
itself”
And you add, “that, when you exclude them from being a part of the state, you rather conform to the spirit of the age than to any abstract doctrine”; but you consider the Constitution as already estabhshed—that our state is Protestant. “It was declared so at the Revolution. It was so provided in the acts for settling the succession of the crown:—the king’s coronation oath was enjoined in order to keep it so. The king, as first magistrate of the state, is obliged to take the oath of abjuration, and to subscribe the Declaration; and by laws subsequent, every other magistrate and member of the state, legislative and executive, are bound under the same obligation.”
As to the plan to which these maxims are applied, I cannot speak, as I told you, positively about it: because neither from your letter, nor from any information I have been able to collect, do I find anything settled, either on the part of the Roman Catholics themselves, or on that of any persons who may wish to conduct their affairs in Parliament. But if I have leave to conjecture, something is in agitation towards admitting them, under
certain qualifications,
to have
some share
in the election of members of Parliament. This I understand is the scheme of those who are entitled to come within your description of persons of consideration, property, and character—and firmly attached to the king and Constitution, as by “law established, with a grateful sense of your former concessions, and a patient reliance on the benignity of Parliament for the further mitigation of the laws that still affect them.”—As to the low, thoughtless, wild, and profligate, who have joined themselves with those of other professions, but of the same character, you are not to imagine that for a moment I can suppose them to be met with anything else than the manly and enlightened energy of a firm government, supported by the united efforts of all virtuous men, if ever their proceedings should become so considerable as to demand its notice. I really think that such associations should be crushed in their very commencement.
Setting, therefore, this case out of the question, it becomes an object of very serious consideration, whether, because wicked men of various descriptions are engaged in seditious courses, the rational, sober, and valuable part of one description should not be indulged in their sober and rational expectations. You, who have looked deeply into the spirit of the Popery laws, must be perfectly sensible that a great part of the present mischief which we abhor in common (if it at all exists) has arisen from them. Their declared object was, to reduce the Catholics of Ireland to a miserable populace, without property, without estimation, without education. The professed object was, to deprive the few men, who, in spite of those laws, might hold or obtain any property amongst them, of all sort of influence or authority over the rest.They divided the nation into two distinct bodies, without common interest, sympathy, or connection. One of these bodies was to possess
all
the franchises,
all
the property,
all
the education: the other was to be composed of drawers of water and cutters of turf for them. Are we to be astonished, when, by the efforts of so much violence in conquest, and so much policy in regulation, continued without intermission for near an hundred years, we had reduced them to a mob, that, whenever they came to act at all, many of them would act exactly like a mob, without temper, measure, or foresight? Surely it might be just now a matter of temperate discussion, whether you ought not to apply a remedy to the real cause of the evil. If the disorder you speak of be real and considerable, you ought to raise an aristocratic interest, that is, an interest of property and education, amongst them—and to strengthen, by every prudent means, the authority and influence of men of that description....
If the absurd persons you mention find no way of providing for liberty, but by overturning this happy Constitution, and introducing a frantic democracy, let us take care how we prevent better people from any rational expectations of partaking in the benefits of that Constitution as it
stands.
The maxims you establish cut the matter short....
You begin by asserting, that “the Catholics ought to enjoy all things under the state, but that they ought not
to be the state”:
a position which, I believe, in the latter part of it, and in the latitude there expressed, no man of common sense has ever thought proper to dispute; because the contrary implies that the state ought to be in them
exclusively.
But before you have finished the line, you express yourself as if the other member of your proposition, namely, that “they ought not to be a part of the state,” were necessarily included in the first—whereas I conceive it to be as different as a part is from the whole, that is, just as different as possible. I know, indeed, that it is common with those who talk very differently from you, that is, with heat and animosity, to confound those things, and to argue the admission of the Catholics into any, however minute and subordinate, parts of the state, as a surrender into their hands of the whole government of the kingdom. To them I have nothing at all to say.