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The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) by Edmund Burke

E >> Edmund Burke >> The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12)




With his Majesty is the gift of all the rewards, the honors,
distinctions, favors, and graces of the state; with his Majesty is the
mitigation of all the rigors of the law: and we rejoice to see the crown
possessed of trusts calculated to obtain good-will, and charged with
duties which are popular and pleasing. Our trusts are of a different
kind. Our duties are harsh and invidious in their nature; and justice
and safety is all we can expect in the exercise of them. We are to offer
salutary, which is not always pleasing counsel: we are to inquire and to
accuse; and the objects of our inquiry and charge will be for the most
part persons of wealth, power, and extensive connections: we are to make
rigid laws for the preservation of revenue, which of necessity more or
less confine some action or restrain some function which before was
free: what is the most critical and invidious of all, the whole body of
the public impositions originate from us, and the hand of the House of
Commons is seen and felt in every burden that presses on the people.
Whilst ultimately we are serving them, and in the first instance whilst
we are serving his Majesty, it will be hard indeed, if we should see a
House of Commons the victim of its zeal and fidelity, sacrificed by his
ministers to those very popular discontents which shall be excited by
our dutiful endeavors for the security and greatness of his throne. No
other consequence can result from such an example, but that, in future,
the House of Commons, consulting its safety at the expense of its
duties, and suffering the whole energy of the state to be relaxed, will
shrink from every service which, however necessary, is of a great and
arduous nature,--or that, willing to provide for the public necessities,
and at the same time to secure the means of performing that task, they
will exchange independence for protection, and will court a subservient
existence through the favor of those ministers of state or those secret
advisers who ought themselves to stand in awe of the Commons of this
realm.

A House of Commons respected by his ministers is essential to his
Majesty's service: it is fit that they should yield to Parliament, and
not that Parliament should be new-modelled until it is fitted to their
purposes. If our authority is only to be held up when we coincide in
opinion with his Majesty's advisers, but is to be set at nought the
moment it differs from them, the House of Commons will sink into a mere
appendage of administration, and will lose that independent character
which, inseparably connecting the honor and reputation with the acts of
this House, enables us to afford a real, effective, and substantial
support to his government. It is the deference shown to our opinion,
when we dissent from the servants of the crown, which alone can give
authority to the proceedings of this House, when it concurs with their
measures.

That authority once lost, the credit of his Majesty's crown will be
impaired in the eyes of all nations. Foreign powers, who may yet wish to
revive a friendly intercourse with this nation, will look in vain for
that hold which gave a connection with Great Britain the preference to
an affiance with any other state. A House of Commons of which ministers
were known to stand in awe, where everything was necessarily discussed
on principles fit to be openly and publicly avowed, and which could not
be retracted or varied without danger, furnished a ground of confidence
in the public faith which the engagement of no state dependent on the
fluctuation of personal favor and private advice can ever pretend to. If
faith with the House of Commons, the grand security for the national
faith itself, can be broken with impunity, a wound is given to the
political importance of Great Britain which will not easily be healed.

That there was a great variance between the late House of Commons and
certain persons, whom his Majesty has been advised to make and continue
as ministers, in defiance of the advice of that House, is notorious to
the world. That House did not confide in those ministers; and they
withheld their confidence from them for reasons for which posterity will
honor and respect the names of those who composed that House of Commons,
distinguished for its independence. They could not confide in persons
who have shown a disposition to dark and dangerous intrigues. By these
intrigues they have weakened, if not destroyed, the clear assurance
which his Majesty's people, and which all nations, ought to have of what
are and what are not the real acts of his government.

If it should be seen that his ministers may continue in their offices
without any signification to them of his Majesty's displeasure at any of
their measures, whilst persons considerable for their rank, and known to
have had access to his Majesty's sacred person, can with impunity abuse
that advantage, and employ his Majesty's name to disavow and counteract
the proceedings of his official servants, nothing but distrust, discord,
debility, contempt of all authority, and general confusion, can prevail
in his government.

This we lay before his Majesty, with humility and concern, as the
inevitable effect of a spirit of intrigue in his executive government:
an evil which we have but too much reason to be persuaded exists and
increases. During the course of the last session it broke out in a
manner the most alarming. This evil was infinitely aggravated by the
unauthorized, but not disavowed, use which has been made of his
Majesty's name, for the purpose of the most unconstitutional, corrupt,
and dishonorable influence on the minds of the members of Parliament
that ever was practised in this kingdom. No attention even to exterior
decorum, in the practice of corruption and intimidation employed on
peers, was observed: several peers were obliged under menaces to retract
their declarations and to recall their proxies.

The Commons have the deepest interest in the purity and integrity of the
Peerage. The Peers dispose of all the property in the kingdom, in the
last resort; and they dispose of it on their honor, and not on their
oaths, as all the members of every other tribunal in the kingdom must
do,--though in them the proceeding is not conclusive. We have,
therefore, a right to demand that no application shall be made to peers
of such a nature as may give room to call in question, much less to
attaint, our sole security for all that we possess. This corrupt
proceeding appeared to the House of Commons, who are the natural
guardians of the purity of Parliament, and of the purity of every branch
of judicature, a most reprehensible and dangerous practice, tending to
shake the very foundation of the authority of the House of Peers; and
they branded it as such by their resolution.

The House had not sufficient evidence to enable them legally to punish
this practice, but they had enough to caution them against all
confidence in the authors and abettors of it. They performed their duty
in humbly advising his Majesty against the employment of such ministers;
but his Majesty was advised to keep those ministers, and to dissolve
that Parliament. The House, aware of the importance and urgency of its
duty with regard to the British interests in India, which were and are
in the utmost disorder, and in the utmost peril, most humbly requested
his Majesty not to dissolve the Parliament during the course of their
very critical proceedings on that subject. His Majesty's gracious
condescension to that request was conveyed in the royal faith, pledged
to a House of Parliament, and solemnly delivered from the throne. It was
but a very few days after a committee had been, with the consent and
concurrence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, appointed for an inquiry
into certain accounts delivered to the House by the Court of Directors,
and then actually engaged in that inquiry, that the ministers,
regardless of the assurance given from the crown to a House of Commons,
did dissolve that Parliament. We most humbly submit to his Majesty's
consideration the consequences of this their breach of public faith.

Whilst the members of the House of Commons, under that security, were
engaged in his Majesty's and the national business, endeavors were
industriously used to calumniate those whom it was found impracticable
to corrupt. The reputation of the members, and the reputation of the
House itself, was undermined in every part of the kingdom.

In the speech from the throne relative to India, we are cautioned by the
ministers "not to lose sight of the effect any measure may have on the
Constitution of our country." We are apprehensive that a calumnious
report, spread abroad, of an attack upon his Majesty's prerogative by
the late House of Commons, may have made an impression on his royal
mind, and have given occasion to this unusual admonition to the present.
This attack is charged to have been made in the late Parliament by a
bill which passed the House of Commons, in the late session of that
Parliament, for the regulation of the affairs, for the preservation of
the commerce, and for the amendment of the government of this nation, in
the East Indies.

That his Majesty and his people may have an opportunity of entering into
the ground of this injurious charge, we beg leave humbly to acquaint his
Majesty, that, far from having made any infringement whatsoever on any
part of his royal prerogative, that bill did, for a limited time, give
to his Majesty certain powers never before possessed by the crown; and
for this his present ministers (who, rather than fall short in the
number of their calumnies, employ some that are contradictory) have
slandered this House, as aiming at the extension of an unconstitutional
influence in his Majesty's crown. This pretended attempt to increase the
influence of the crown they were weak enough to endeavor to persuade his
Majesty's people was amongst the causes which excited his Majesty's
resentment against his late ministers.

Further, to remove the impressions of this calumny concerning an attempt
in the House of Commons against his prerogative, it is proper to inform
his Majesty, that the territorial possessions in the East Indies never
have been declared by any public judgment, act, or instrument, or any
resolution of Parliament whatsoever, to be the subject matter of his
Majesty's prerogative; nor have they ever been understood as belonging
to his ordinary administration, or to be annexed or united to his crown;
but that they are acquisitions of a new and peculiar description,[65]
unknown to the ancient executive constitution of this country.

From time to time, therefore, Parliament provided for their government
according to its discretion, and to its opinion of what was required by
the public necessities. We do not know that his Majesty was entitled,
by prerogative, to exercise any act of authority whatsoever in the
Company's affairs, or that, in effect, such authority has ever been
exercised. His Majesty's patronage was not taken away by that bill;
because it is notorious that his Majesty never originally had the
appointment of a single officer, civil or military, in the Company's
establishment in India: nor has the least degree of patronage ever been
acquired to the crown in any other manner or measure than as the power
was thought expedient to be granted by act of Parliament,--that is, by
the very same authority by which the offices were disposed of and
regulated in the bill which his Majesty's servants have falsely and
injuriously represented as infringing upon the prerogative of the crown.

Before the year 1773 the whole administration of India, and the whole
patronage to office there, was in the hands of the East India Company.
The East India Company is not a branch of his Majesty's prerogative
administration, nor does that body exercise any species of authority
under it, nor indeed from any British title that does not derive all its
legal validity from acts of Parliament.

When a claim was asserted to the India territorial possessions in the
occupation of the Company, these possessions were not claimed as parcel
of his Majesty's patrimonial estate, or as a fruit of the ancient
inheritance of his crown: they were claimed for the public. And when
agreements were made with the East India Company concerning any
composition for the holding, or any participation of the profits, of
those territories, the agreement was made with the public; and the
preambles of the several acts have uniformly so stated it. These
agreements were not made (even nominally) with his Majesty, but with
Parliament: and the bills making and establishing such agreements always
originated in this House; which appropriated the money to await the
disposition of Parliament, without the ceremony of previous consent from
the crown even so much as suggested by any of his ministers: which
previous consent is an observance of decorum, not indeed of strict
right, but generally paid, when a new appropriation takes place in any
part of his Majesty's prerogative revenues.

In pursuance of a right thus uniformly recognized and uniformly acted
on, when Parliament undertook the reformation of the East India Company
in 1773, a commission was appointed, as the commission in the late bill
was appointed; and it was made to continue for a term of years, as the
commission in the late bill was to continue; all the commissioners were
named in Parliament, as in the late bill they were named. As they
received, so they held their offices, wholly independent of the crown;
they held them for a fixed term; they were not removable by an address
of either House or even of both Houses of Parliament, a precaution
observed in the late bill relative to the commissioners proposed
therein; nor were they bound by the strict rules of proceeding which
regulated and restrained the late commissioners against all possible
abuse of a power which could not fail of being diligently and zealously
watched by the ministers of the crown, and the proprietors of the stock,
as well as by Parliament. Their proceedings were, in that bill, directed
to be of such a nature as easily to subject them to the strictest
revision of both, in case of any malversation.

In the year 1780, an act of Parliament again made provision for the
government of those territories for another four years, without any sort
of reference to prerogative; nor was the least objection taken at the
second, more than at the first of those periods, as if an infringement
had been made upon the rights of the crown: yet his Majesty's ministers
have thought fit to represent the late commission as an entire
innovation on the Constitution, and the setting up a new order and
estate in the nation, tending to the subversion of the monarchy itself.

If the government of the East Indies, other than by his Majesty's
prerogative, be in effect a fourth order in the commonwealth, this order
has long existed; because the East India Company has for many years
enjoyed it in the fullest extent, and does at this day enjoy the whole
administration of those provinces, and the patronage to offices
throughout that great empire, except as it is controlled by act of
Parliament.

It was the ill condition and ill administration of the Company's affairs
which induced this House (merely as a temporary establishment) to vest
the same powers which the Company did before possess, (and no other,)
for a limited time, and under very strict directions, in proper hands,
until they could be restored, or farther provision made concerning them.
It was therefore no creation whatever of a new power, but the removal of
an old power, long since created, and then existing, from the management
of those persons who had manifestly and dangerously abused their trust.
This House, which well knows the Parliamentary origin of all the
Company's powers and privileges, and is not ignorant or negligent of the
authority which may vest those powers and privileges in others, if
justice and the public safety so require, is conscious to itself that it
no more creates a new order in the state, by making occasional trustees
for the direction of the Company, than it originally did in giving a
much more permanent trust to the Directors or to the General Court of
that body. The monopoly of the East India Company was a derogation from
the general freedom of trade belonging to his Majesty's people. The
powers of government, and of peace and war, are parts of prerogative of
the highest order. Of our competence to restrain the rights of all his
subjects by act of Parliament, and to vest those high and eminent
prerogatives even in a particular company of merchants, there has been
no question. We beg leave most humbly to claim as our right, and as a
right which this House has always used, to frame such bills for the
regulation of that commerce, and of the territories held by the East
India Company, and everything relating to them, as to our discretion
shall seem fit; and we assert and maintain that therein we follow, and
do not innovate on, the Constitution.

That his Majesty's ministers, misled by their ambition, have
endeavored, if possible, to form a faction in the country against the
popular part of the Constitution; and have therefore thought proper to
add to their slanderous accusation against a House of Parliament,
relative to his Majesty's prerogative, another of a different nature,
calculated for the purpose of raising fears and jealousies among the
corporate bodies of the kingdom, and of persuading uninformed persons
belonging to those corporations to look to and to make addresses to
them, as protectors of their rights, under their several charters, from
the designs which they, without any ground, charged the then House of
Commons to have formed against _charters in general_. For this purpose
they have not scrupled to assert that the exertion of his Majesty's
prerogative in the late precipitate change in his administration, and
the dissolution of the late Parliament, were measures adopted in order
to rescue the people and their rights out of the hands of the House of
Commons, their representatives.

We trust that his Majesty's subjects are not yet so far deluded as to
believe that the charters, or that any other of their local or general
privileges, can have a solid security in any place but where that
security has always been looked for, and always found,--in the House of
Commons. Miserable and precarious indeed would be the state of their
franchises, if they were to find no defence but from that quarter from
whence they have always been attacked![66] But the late House of
Commons, in passing that bill, made no attack upon any powers or
privileges, except such as a House of Commons has frequently attacked,
and will attack, (and they trust, in the end, with their wonted
success,)--that is, upon those which are corruptly and oppressively
administered; and this House do faithfully assure his Majesty, that we
will correct, and, if necessary for the purpose, as far as in us lies,
will wholly destroy, every species of power and authority exercised by
British subjects to the oppression, wrong, and detriment of the people,
and to the impoverishment and desolation of the countries subject to it.

The propagators of the calumnies against that House of Parliament have
been indefatigable in exaggerating the supposed injury done to the East
India Company by the suspension of the authorities which they have in
every instance abused,--as if power had been wrested by wrong and
violence from just and prudent hands; but they have, with equal care,
concealed the weighty grounds and reasons on which that House had
adopted the most moderate of all possible expedients for rescuing the
natives of India from oppression, and for saving the interests of the
real and honest proprietors of their stock, as well as that great
national, commercial concern, from imminent ruin.

The ministers aforesaid have also caused it to be reported that the
House of Commons have confiscated the property of the East India
Company. It is the reverse of truth. The whole management was a trust
for the proprietors, under their own inspection, (and it was so provided
for in the bill,) and under the inspection of Parliament. That bill, so
far from confiscating the Company's property, was the only one which,
for several years past, did not, in some shape or other, affect their
property, or restrain them in the disposition of it.

It is proper that his Majesty and all his people should be informed that
the House of Commons have proceeded, with regard to the East India
Company, with a degree of care, circumspection, and deliberation, which
has not been equalled in the history of Parliamentary proceedings. For
sixteen years the state and condition of that body has never been wholly
out of their view. In the year 1767 the House took those objects into
consideration, in a committee of the whole House. The business was
pursued in the following year. In the year 1772 two committees were
appointed for the same purpose, which examined into their affairs with
much diligence, and made very ample reports. In the year 1773 the
proceedings were carried to an act of Parliament, which proved
ineffectual to its purpose. The oppressions and abuses in India have
since rather increased than diminished, on account of the greatness of
the temptations, and convenience of the opportunities, which got the
better of the legislative provisions calculated against ill practices
then in their beginnings; insomuch that, in 1781, two committees were
again instituted, who have made seventeen reports. It was upon the most
minute, exact, and laborious collection and discussion of facts, that
the late House of Commons proceeded in the reform which they attempted
in the administration of India, but which has been frustrated by ways
and means the most dishonorable to his Majesty's government, and the
most pernicious to the Constitution of this kingdom. His Majesty was so
sensible of the disorders in the Company's administration, that the
consideration of that subject was no less than six times recommended to
this House in speeches from the throne.

The result of the Parliamentary inquiries has been, that the East India
Company was found totally corrupted, and totally perverted from the
purposes of its institution, whether political or commercial; that the
powers of war and peace given by the charter had been abused, by
kindling hostilities in every quarter for the purposes of rapine; that
almost all the treaties of peace they have made have only given cause to
so many breaches of public faith; that countries once the most
flourishing are reduced to a state of indigence, decay, and
depopulation, to the diminution of our strength, and to the infinite
dishonor of our national character; that the laws of this kingdom are
notoriously, and almost in every instance, despised; that the servants
of the Company, by the purchase of qualifications to vote in the General
Court, and, at length, by getting the Company itself deeply in their
debt, have obtained the entire and absolute mastery in the body by which
they ought to have been ruled and coerced. Thus their malversations in
office are supported, instead of being checked by the Company. The whole
of the affairs of that body are reduced to a most perilous situation;
and many millions of innocent and deserving men, who are under the
protection of this nation, and who ought to be protected by it, are
oppressed by a most despotic and rapacious tyranny. The Company and
their servants, having strengthened themselves by this confederacy, set
at defiance the authority and admonitions of this House employed to
reform them; and when this House had selected certain principal
delinquents, whom they declared it the duty of the Company to recall,
the Company held out its legal privileges against all reformation,
positively refused to recall them, and supported those who had fallen
under the just censure of this House with new and stronger marks of
countenance and approbation.

The late House, discovering the reversed situation of the Company, by
which the nominal servants are really the masters, and the offenders are
become their own judges, thought fit to examine into the state of their
commerce; and they have also discovered that their commercial affairs
are in the greatest disorder; that their debts have accumulated beyond
any present or obvious future means of payment, at least under the
actual administration of their affairs; that this condition of the East
India Company has begun to affect the sinking fund itself, on which the
public credit of the kingdom rests,--a million and upwards being due to
the customs, which that House of Commons whose intentions towards the
Company have been so grossly misrepresented were indulgent enough to
respite. And thus, instead of confiscating their property, the Company
received without interest (which in such a case had been before charged)
the use of a very large sum of the public money. The revenues are under
the peculiar care of this House, not only as the revenues originate from
us, but as, on every failure if the funds set apart for the support of
the national credit, or to provide for the national strength and safety,
the task of supplying every deficiency falls upon his Majesty's faithful
Commons, this House must, in effect, tax the people. The House,
therefore, at every moment, incurs the hazard of becoming obnoxious to
its constituents.

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