Speech on Conciliation with America by Edmund Burke
A Brief Introduction to the Author and the Speech
A Short Biographical Sketch of the Author
Edmund Burke was born on New Year's Day, 1729, in Dublin. Since Ireland and England were at that time one country, it was natural for him to pursue a literary and political career in London after graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1748. An energetic campaigner and exceptional orator, Burke was first elected to the House of Commons in 1765, and thereafter was one of the leading British parliamentarians for nearly thirty years, finally retiring from Parliament only in 1794.
When Burke was born, Dublin then was rising toward the height of its prosperity and fame. Even though he was the son of a successful lawyer, connected with Irish county families, no one could have expected, in 1729, the eminence that this boy would attain. It was an age of aristocracy, which the Tory statesman and philosopher Bolingbroke hoped would be dominated by men of "aristocratic virtue" influenced by humane learning. Relatively obscure, the Burkes were provincial, and not rich.
Like many Irish couples of that time, the elder Burkes had entered into a 'mixed marriage,' Edmund's father being a member of the Church of Ireland – an Anglican, – and his mother a Catholic. With his two brothers, Edmund was reared as an Anglican; while his sister, Juliana, brought up in the "old profession," remained all her life an ardent Catholic. One of Burke's chief endeavors in Parliament, half a century later, was to effect the amendment of the "Penal Laws" that weighed down Irish Catholics. Burke's early career s hampered somewhat by the suspicion of the Whig Duke of Newcastle, and others, that the rising young man was a secret Papist, draped him in a Jesuit habit. or even a Jesuit in disguise and political caricaturists later sometimes draped him in a Jesuit habit.
Despite these impediments, Edmund Burke was to become the most interesting of British political philosophers, one of the greatest of modern rhetoricians, the principal intellectual leader of the Whig party, and the most formidable opponent of the French Revolution and of "armed doctrine" generally. He drew up, in the phrase of Harold Laski, "the permanent manual of political wisdom without which statesmen are as sailors on an uncharted sea."
Burke became a public man. His private life is sufficiently obscure, for he labored incessantly as a practical politician. But, it is the public Burke who matters. He was a gifted man who by the power of intellect and remarkable diligence rose to distinction in his time. Burke's public life shows us the process by which, through the experience of the world and through the life of the mind, an Irish writer and political partisan made of himself one of the wisest men ever to meditate upon the civil social order.
As a practical politician, Burke did not succeed conspicuously. During the larger part of his career, he stood among the opposition. In the hour of his death, 1797 - Burke beheld the triumph of his denunciations of the Revolution in France, but only a triumph of dubious battle. But, Burke was more than a party leader and a man of his time. As the champion of what T. S. Eliot called "the permanent things," Burke did not fail, nor is he archaic. He is still relevant.
Burke's political views defy modern categories. On the one hand, he is often claimed to be the father of modern conservatism because he vociferously opposed Jacobinism, and argued in favor of the merits of tradition and status in the maintenance of social order. On the other hand, he was a hero to radicals on a variety of issues. He was an early and controversial critic of slavery. He was amongst the most popular writers of America's constitutional founders and condemned British policy in America before and during the War of Independence.
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