They who carried on this system looked to the irresistible force of Great Britain for their support in their acts of power.
Edmund Burke
The Public Record
Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician who is widely credited as the founder of the cultural and political philosophy of conservatism. Regarded as one of the most influential conservative thinkers and political writers of the 18th century, Burke spent the majority of his career in Great Britain and was elected as a member of Parliament (MP) from 1766 to 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. His writings played a significant role in influencing public views and opinions in both Great Britain and France following the French Revolution in 1789, and he remains a major figure in modern conservative circles.
gutenberg.org
All the penal laws of that unparalleled code of oppression, which were made after the last event, were manifestly the effects of national hatred and scorn towards a conquered people, whom the victors delighted to trample upon and were not…
The statutes of Kilkenny show that the spirit of the Popery laws, and some even of their actual provisions, as applied between Englishry and Irishry, had existed in that harassed country before the words Protestant and Papist were heard of…
What was done was not in the spirit of a contest between two religious factions, but between two adverse nations.
In truth, the spirit of those proceedings did not commence at that era, nor was religion of any kind their primary object.
So, after some time, and after one of the most rigid conquests that we read of in history, the Normans softened into the English.
To insist on everything done in Ireland at the Revolution would be to insist on the severe and jealous policy of a conqueror, in the crude settlement of his new acquisition, as a permanent rule for its future government.
It was, to say the truth, not a revolution, but a conquest: which is not to say a great deal in its favor.
In Ireland it was the establishment of the power of the smaller number, at the expense of the civil liberties and properties of the far greater part, and at the expense of the political liberties of the whole.
In England it was the struggle of the great body of the people for the establishment of their liberties, against the efforts of a very small faction, who would have oppressed them.
Supposing the principles to have been altogether the same in both kingdoms, by the application of those principles to very different objects the whole spirit of the system was changed, not to say reversed.
I shall not think that the deprivation of some millions of people of all the rights of citizens, and all interest in the Constitution, in and to which they were born, was a thing conformable to the declared principles of the Revolution.
First, I cannot possibly confound in my mind all the things which were done at the Revolution with the principles of the Revolution.
It is putting things into the position of an ugly alternative, into which I hope in God they never will be put.
Whenever I shall be convinced, which will be late and reluctantly, that the safety of the Church is utterly inconsistent with all the civil rights whatsoever of the far larger part of the inhabitants of our country, I shall be extremely…
This way of proscribing men by whole nations, as it were, from all the benefits of the Constitution to which they were born, I never can believe to be politic or expedient, much less necessary for the existence of any state or church in…
It would be a very strange thing, if there should not only exist anomalies in our laws, a thing not easy to prevent, but that the fundamental parts of the Constitution should be perpetually and irreconcilably at variance with each other.
Those franchises are part of the Constitution itself, and inseparable from it.
Magna Charta, which secured these franchises to the subjects, regarded the rights of freeholders in counties to be as much a fundamental part of the Constitution as the establishment of the Church of England was thought either at that…
Now, although this Magna Charta, or some of the statutes establishing it, provide that that law shall be perpetual, and all statutes contrary to it shall be void, yet I cannot go so far as to deny the authority of statutes made in defiance…
I admit the acts of King William and Queen Anne to be fundamental, but they are not the only fundamental laws.
If such means can with any probability be shown, from circumstances, rather to add strength to our mixed ecclesiastical and secular Constitution than to weaken it, surely they are means infinitely to be preferred to penalties…
You never would have done it, if you did not think it could be done with perfect repose to the royal conscience, and perfect safety to the national established religion.
If continued, it would play the game of that sort of active, proselytizing, and persecuting atheism which is the disgrace and calamity of our time, and which we see to be as capable of subverting a government as any mode can be of…
The countenance given from a spirit of controversy to that negative religion may by degrees encourage light and unthinking people to a total indifference to everything positive in matters of doctrine, and, in the end, of practice too.
Politicians like Edmund Burke
