The alleged compromise of the national dignity implied in a withdrawal of the just claim of the Government, instead of convincing, only exasperated him.  “Show the thing you contend for to be reason; show it to be common sense; show it to be the means of attaining some useful end; and then I am content to allow it what dignity you please."[1] The next year he took up the ground still more firmly, and explained it still more impressively.  As for the question of the right of taxation, he exclaimed, “It is less than nothing in my consideration....  My consideration is narrow, confined, and wholly limited to the policy of the question.  I do not examine whether the giving away a man’s money be a power excepted and reserved out of the general trust of Government.... The question with me is not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do, but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.  I am not determining a point of law; I am restoring tranquillity, and the general character and situation of a people must determine what sort of government is fitted for them.”  “I am not here going into the distinctions of rights,” he cries, “not attempting to mark their boundaries.  I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions. I hate the very sound of them.  This is the true touchstone of all theories which regard man and the affairs of man:  does it suit his nature in general?—­does it suit his nature as modified by his habits?” He could not bear to think of having legislative or political arrangements shaped or vindicated by a delusive geometrical accuracy of deduction, instead of being entrusted to “the natural operation of things, which, left to themselves, generally fall into their proper order.”

[Footnote 1:  “Speech on American Taxation.”]

Apart from his incessant assertion of the principle that man acts from adequate motives relative to his interests, and not on metaphysical speculations, Burke sows, as he marches along in his stately argument, many a germ of the modern philosophy of civilisation.  He was told that America was worth fighting for.  “Certainly it is,” he answered, “if fighting a people be the best way of gaining them.”  Every step that has been taken in the direction of progress, not merely in empire, but in education, in punishment, in the treatment of the insane, has shown the deep wisdom, so unfamiliar in that age of ferocious penalties and brutal methods, of this truth—­that “the natural effect of fidelity, clemency, kindness in governors, is peace, good-will, order, and esteem in the governed.”  Is there a single instance to the contrary?  Then there is that sure key to wise politics:—­“Nobody shall persuade me when a whole people are concerned, that acts of lenity are not means of conciliation.”  And that still more famous sentence, “I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people.”