Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on How One Private Citizen Can Avert a Public Crisis)

“How often has public calamity been arrested on the very brink of ruin by the seasonable energy of a single man! Have we no such man amongst us? I am as sure as I am of my being, that one vigorous mind, without office, without situation, without public functions of any kind (at a time when the want of such a thing is felt, as I am sure it is), I say, one such man, confiding in the aid of God, and full of just reliance in his own fortitude, vigor, enterprise, and perseverance, would first draw to him some few like himself, and then that multitudes, hardly thought to be in existence, would appear and troop about him.”—Anglo-Irish statesman and father of conservatism Edmund Burke (1729-1797), “Letter to William Elliot,” May 28, 1795, in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) (1887)

The kind of person envisioned by Burke possesses not just “seasonable energy” but moral stature to influence followers. In our cynical age, who wields such authority?

If there is such a person, I hope he or she will step forward quickly.

Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on ‘Anxious Apprehensions’)

"Better be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident security."—Anglo-Irish statesman and conservative political philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on History and ‘The Past Errors and Infirmities of Mankind’)

“In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.”—Anglo-Irish statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on the Religious Dissenting Spirit Behind the American Revolution)

“Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired; and their mode of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is the most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. This is a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it. I do not think, Sir, that the reason of this averseness in the dissenting churches, from all that looks like absolute government, is so much to be sought in their religious tenets, as in their history. Every one knows that the Roman Catholic religion is at least coeval with most of the governments where it prevails; that it has generally gone hand in hand with them, and received great favour and every kind of support from authority. The Church of England too was formed from her cradle under the nursing care of regular government. But the dissenting interests have sprung up in direct opposition to all the ordinary powers of the world; and could justify that opposition only on a strong claim to natural liberty. Their very existence depended on the powerful and unremitted assertion of that claim. All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion. This religion, under a variety of denominations agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty, is predominant in most of the northern provinces; where the Church of England, notwithstanding its legal rights, is in reality no more than a sort of private sect, not composing most probably the tenth of the people. The colonists left England when this spirit was high, and in the emigrants was the highest of all; and even that stream of foreigners, which has been constantly flowing into these colonies, has, for the greatest part, been composed of dissenters from the establishments of their several countries, and have brought with them a temper and character far from alien to that of the people with whom they mixed.”—Anglo-Irish statesman and father of conservatism Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies, delivered March 22, 1775

The separation of church and state was one of the most tangled subjects in contemporary debates about government—a fact underscored by the explosion of commentary from both the left and right, much of it unhelpful, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade.

It would be a stretch to say, as many on the right would have it, that America was founded as an explicitly “Christian nation.”

But habits of mind formed in Americans’ religious practice—principally, those related to resistance to “all implicit submission of mind and opinion”—lay at the heart of American colonists’ increasing alienation from England, and those instincts would make it impossible for the Mother Country to continue to impose punitive legislation on the colonists, warned Edmund Burke.

One month before British troops clashed with the Americans at Lexington and Concord, this father of modern conservatism cautioned the House of Commons about the futility of coercion. A key part of his argument against force was the temperament of the colonists in their environment. British North America, he noted, was disproportionately composed of "dissenters from the establishments of their several countries."

Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on ‘The Great Error of Our Nature’)

“The great Error of our Nature is, not to know where to stop, not to be satisfied with any reasonable Acquirement; not to compound with our Condition; but to lose all we have gained by an insatiable Pursuit after more.”—Anglo-Irish statesman (and father of conservatism) Edmund Burke (1729-1797), A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)

Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on the Link Between the Past and Posterity)

“People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.”—Anglo-Irish orator and statesman Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on Why ‘Law and Arbitrary Power Are in Eternal Enmity’)

“Law and arbitrary power are in eternal enmity. Name me a magistrate, and I will name property; name me power, and I will name protection. It is a contradiction in terms, it is blasphemy in religion, it is wickedness in politics, to say that any man can have arbitrary power. In every patent of office the duty is included. For what else does a magistrate exist? To suppose for power is an absurdity in idea. Judges are guided and governed by the eternal laws of justice, to which we are all subject. We may bite our chains, if we will, but we shall be made to know ourselves, and be taught that man is born to be governed by law; and he that will substitute will in the place of it is an enemy to God.”—Anglo-Irish politician-statesman—and conservative theorist—Edmund Burke (1729-1797), “Speech on The Impeachment of Warren Hastings,” Feb. 15, 1788

The subject of this searing meditation on power and the law was Warren Hastings, born on this day in Churchill, Oxfordshire, England, in 1732. Having risen through the East Indian Company to become the first de facto Governor-General of India, Hastings was accused of mismanagement and personal corruption while in power from 1772 to 1785. Edmund Burke (pictured), outraged by reports of abuses on the subcontinent, spearheaded the impeachment process against Hastings. 

The resulting trial before the House of Lords, extraordinarily long (from 1788 to 1795), ended in Hastings’ acquittal on charges of extortion and bribery, but not before Burke gave voice to some of the most compelling and eloquent thoughts on the proper exercise of power ever delivered by a Western statesman.

British historian and Whig politician Thomas Babington Macaulay vividly conveys the impact of Burke’s blistering four-day opening speech against Hastings, an autumnal burst of eloquence by the aging statesman:

“The energy and pathos of the great orator extorted expressions of unwonted admiration even from the stern and hostile Chancellor Thurlow; and, for a moment, seemed to pierce even the.resolute heart of the defendant. The ladies in the galleries, unaccustomed to such displays of eloquence, excited by the solemnity of the occasion, and perhaps not unwilling to display their taste and sensibility, were in a state of uncontrollable emotion. Handkerchiefs were pulled out; smelling bottles were handed round; hysterical sobs and screams were heard: and Mrs. [Richard Brinsley] Sheridan was carried out in a fit.”

The Hastings impeachment trial has had implications beyond Britain or even its overseas possessions such as India. Politics in the early U.S. republic still avidly followed the fortunes of Burke, who, even upon the outbreak of the American Revolution, had advocated for the necessity of reconciliation with the rebellious colonies and against the folly of abusing their rights.

For the United States, then in the midst of a furious debate on its own Constitution, the Hastings trial threw into sharp relief the question of impeachment’s use as a tool to redress maladministration, corruption, and abuse of power. 

The framers were influenced enough by what they read overseas to insert the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” into the founding document of their new republic, indicating that more than just treason was enough to require removal from office. The proceedings in England would influence the debates and denouements of subsequent landmark American impeachment attempts involving Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase and Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.

Burke pursued the case against Hastings despite the fact that Britain as a whole and even his own Whig Party was indifferent at best and hostile at worst to his cause. As the above quote indicates, he recognized the moral, not just political or legal, dimensions of the problem posed by Hastings’ wielding of power through the East India Company. His warning is as valid for 2017 America as it was for 1788 Britain: “he that will substitute will in the place of [law] is an enemy to God.”

At some time in the not-so-distant future, I hope that an American politician (and this is a real dream--a Republican!) will take the President and rake him over the coals with the same sense of outrage that Burke summoned against Hastings:

“I impeach him in the name of the Commons' House of Parliament, whose trust he has betrayed. I impeach him in the name of the English nation, whose ancient honour he has sullied. I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose rights he has trodden under foot, and whose country he has turned into a desert. Lastly, in the name of human nature itself, in the name of both sexes, in the name of every age, in the name of every rank, I impeach the common enemy and oppressor of all!"

Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on How Men Are Ruined)

“All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensities.” —Anglo-Irish orator, statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796)

Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on Toleration)

“Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.”—Anglo-Irish statesman/political philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797), “Speech on the Bill for the Relief of Protestant Dissenters,” March 7, 1773), in Celebrated Speeches of Chatham, Burke, and Erskine (1851)

Quote of the Day (Edmund Burke, on Prudence as the First Political Virtue)

“Nothing universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral or any political subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters. The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are not made by the process of logic, but by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director, regulator, the standard of them all. Metaphysics cannot live without definition; but prudence is cautious how she defines. Our courts cannot be more fearful in suffering fictitious cases to be brought before them for eliciting their determination on a point of law than prudent moralists are in putting extreme and hazardous cases of conscience upon emergencies not existing.”—English statesman Edmund Burke, Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791)