Burke | Page 9

fact, he
made many speeches in Parliament, and some good ones, but none so
good as the first, delivered in a debate in 1755, in which Pitt, Fox,
Grenville, and Murray all took part, and were all outshone by the new
luminary. But the new luminary never shone again with its first
brilliance. He sought Burke out on the strength of the success of the
Vindication of Natural Society, and he seems to have had a taste for
good company. Horace Walpole describes a dinner at his house in the
summer of 1761. "There were Garrick," he says, "and a young Mr.
Burke, who wrote a book in the style of Lord Bolingbroke, that is much

admired. He is a sensible man, but has not worn off his authorism yet,
and thinks there is nothing so charming as writers, and to be one. He
will know better one of these days." The prophecy came true in time,
but it was Burke's passion for authorism that eventually led to a rupture
with his first patron. Hamilton was a man of ability, but selfish and
unreasonable. Dr. Leland afterwards described him compendiously as a
sullen, vain, proud, selfish, canker-hearted, envious reptile.
In 1761 Hamilton went to Ireland as secretary to Lord Halifax, and
Burke accompanied him in some indefinite capacity. "The absenteeism
of her men of genius," an eminent historian has said, "was a worse
wrong to Ireland than the absenteeism of her landlords. If Edmund
Burke had remained in the country where Providence had placed him,
he might have changed the current of its history." [1] It is at least to be
said that Burke was never so absorbed in other affairs as to forget the
peculiar interests of his native land. We have his own word, and his
career does not belie it, that in the elation with which he was filled on
being elected a member of Parliament, what was first and uppermost in
his thoughts was the hope of being somewhat useful to the place of his
birth and education; and to the last he had in it "a dearness of instinct
more than he could justify to reason." In fact the affairs of Ireland had a
most important part in Burke's life at one or two critical moments, and
this is as convenient a place as we are likely to find for describing in a
few words what were the issues. The brief space can hardly be grudged
in an account of a great political writer, for Ireland had furnished the
chief ordeal, test, and standard of English statesmen.
[Footnote 1: Fronde's Ireland, ii. 214.]
Ireland in the middle of the eighteenth century was to England just
what the American colonies would have been, if they had contained,
besides the European settlers, more than twice their number of
unenslaved negroes. After the suppression of the great rebellion of
Tyrconnel by William of Orange, nearly the whole of the land was
confiscated, the peasants were made beggars and outlaws, the Penal
Laws against the Catholics were enacted and enforced, and the grand
reign of Protestant Ascendancy began in all its vileness and

completeness. The Protestants and landlords were supreme; the
peasants and the Catholics were prostrate in despair. The Revolution
brought about in Ireland just the reverse of what it effected in England.
Here it delivered the body of the nation from the attempted supremacy
of a small sect. There it made a small sect supreme over the body of the
nation. "It was, to say the truth," Burke wrote, "not a revolution but a
conquest," and the policy of conquest was treated as the just and
normal system of government. The last conquest of England was in the
eleventh century. The last conquest of Ireland was at the very end of
the seventeenth.
Sixty years after the event, when Burke revisited Ireland, some
important changes had taken place. The English settlers of the
beginning of the century had formed an Irish interest. They had become
Anglo-Irish, just as the colonists still further west had formed a colonial
interest and become Anglo-American. The same conduct on the part of
the mother country promoted the growth of these hostile interests in
both cases. The commercial policy pursued by England towards
America was identical with that pursued towards Ireland. The industry
of the Anglo-Irish traders was restricted, their commerce and even their
production fettered, their prosperity checked, for the benefit of the
merchants of Manchester and Bristol. Crescit Roma Albae ruinis. "The
bulk of the people," said Stone, the Primate, "are not regularly either
lodged, clothed, or fed; and those things which in England are called
necessaries of life, are to us only accidents, and we can, and in many
places do, subsist without them." On the other hand, the peasantry had