But there is an interior history of Ireland, the genuine voice of its records and monuments, which speaks a very different language from these histories, from Temple and from Clarendon: these restore Nature to its just rights, and policy to its proper order.
Burke critiques historical narratives about Ireland, emphasizing the importance of its true history and the rights of its people.
Share
More from Edmund Burke
They have not more notes in their song than the cuckoo; though, far from the softness of that harbinger of summer and plenty, their voice is as harsh and as ominous as that of the raven.
They rob only to enable them to cheat; but in a very short time they defeat the ends both of the robbery and the fraud, by making out accounts for other purposes, which blow up their whole apparatus of force and of deception.
Never did a state, in any case, enrich itself by the confiscations of the citizens.
But when the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service.
Other voices in this conversation
