are every day endeavoring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own.”  The way for the later despotism of the younger Pitt, was, as Burke saw, prepared by those who persuaded Englishmen of the paltry character of the American contest.  His own receipt was sounder.  In the Speech on American Taxation (1774) he had riddled the view that the fiscal methods of Lord North were likely to succeed.  The true method was to find a way of peace.  “Nobody shall persuade me,” he told a hostile House of Commons, “when a whole people are concerned that acts of lenity are not means of conciliation.”  “Magnanimity in politics,” he said in the next year, “is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.”  He did not know, in the most superb of all his maxims, how to draw up an indictment against a whole people.  He would win the colonies by binding them to England with the ties of freedom.  “The question with me,” he said, “is not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy.”  The problem, in fact, was one not of abstract right but of expediency; and nothing could be lost by satisfying American desire.  Save for Johnson and Gibbon, that was apparent to every first-class mind in England.  But the obstinate king prevailed; and Burke’s great protest remained no more than material for the legislation of the future.  Yet it was something that ninety years after his speech the British North America Act should have given his dreams full substance.

Ireland had always a place apart in Burke’s affections, and when he first entered the House of Commons he admitted that uppermost in his thoughts was the desire to assist its freedom.  He saw that here, as in America, no man will be argued into slavery.  A government which defied the fundamental impulses of men was bound to court disaster.  How could it seek security where it defied the desires of the vast majority of its subjects?  Why is the Irish Catholic to have less justice than the Catholic of Quebec or the Indian Mohammedan?  The system of Protestant control, he said in the Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (1792), was “well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself.”  The Catholics paid their taxes; they served with glory in the army and navy.  Yet they were denied a share in the commonwealth.  “Common sense,” he said, “and common justice dictate ... some sort of compensation to a people for their slavery.”  The British Constitution was not made “for great, general and proscriptive exclusions; sooner or later it will destroy them, or they will destroy the constitution.”  The argument that the body of Catholics was prone to sedition was no reason to oppress them.  “No man will assert seriously,” he said, “that when people are of a turbulent spirit the best way to keep them in order is to furnish them with something to complain of.”  The advantages of subjects were, as he urged, their right; and a wise government would regard “all their reasonable wishes as so many claims.”  To neglect them was to have a nation full of uneasiness; and the end was bound to be disaster.