We are sure that we must have your Majesty's heart along with us, when we declare in favor of mixing something conciliatory with our force.
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.
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We wish that they may yield to well-ascertained, well-authenticated, and well-secured terms of reconciliation,--not that your Majesty should owe the recovery of your dominions to their total waste and destruction.
We know and feel that arbitrary power over distant regions is not within the competence, nor to be exercised agreeably to the forms or consistently with the spirit, of great popular assemblies.
To leave any real freedom to Parliament, freedom must be left to the colonies.
That the establishment of such a power in America will utterly ruin our finances (though its certain effect) is the smallest part of our concern.
It will become an apt, powerful, and certain engine for the destruction of our freedom here.
If we could flatter ourselves that this would not happen, we must be the weakest of men; we must be the worst, if we were indifferent whether it happened or not.
What, gracious sovereign, is the empire of America to us, or the empire of the world, if we lose our own liberties?
The consequence is not certain; but a general change of principles rarely happens among a people without leading to a change of government.
If but the smallest hope should from any circumstances appear of a return to the ancient maxims and true policy of this kingdom, we shall with joy and readiness return to our attendance, in order to give our hearty support to whatever…
The very dangerous crisis into which the British empire is brought, as it accounts for, so it justifies, the unusual step we take in addressing ourselves to you.
The distempers of the state are grown to such a degree of violence and malignity as to render all ordinary remedies vain and frivolous.
In such a deplorable situation, an adherence to the common forms of business appears to us rather as an apology to cover a supine neglect of duty than the means of performing it in a manner adequate to the exigency that presses upon us.
As our last resource, we turn ourselves to you.
The same wicked men, for the same bad purposes, have so far surprised the justice of Parliament as to cut off all communication betwixt us, except what is to go in their own fallacious and hostile channel.
But we conjure you by the invaluable pledges which have hitherto united, and which we trust will hereafter lastingly unite us, that you do not suffer yourselves to be persuaded or provoked into an opinion that you are at war with this…
Do not think that the whole, or even the uninfluenced majority, of Englishmen in this island are enemies to their own blood on the American continent.
But still a large, and we trust the largest and soundest, part of this kingdom perseveres in the most perfect unity of sentiments, principles, and affections with you.
It spreads out a large and liberal platform of common liberty, upon which we may all unite forever.
For ourselves, we faithfully assure you, that we have ever considered you as rational creatures, as free agents, as men willing to pursue and able to discern your own true interest.
We have wished to continue united with you, in order that a people of one origin and one character should be directed to the rational objects of government by joint counsels, and protected in them by a common force.
Sensible of what is due both to the dignity and weakness of man, we have never wished to place over you any government, over which, in great, fundamental points, you should have no sort of check or control in your own hands, or which…
But because, brethren, these professions are general, and such as even enemies may make, when they reserve to themselves the construction of what servitude and what liberty are, we inform you that we adopt your own standard of the blessing…
We are of opinion that you ought to enjoy the sole and exclusive right of freely granting, and applying to the support of your administration, what God has freely granted as a reward to your industry.
In this resource we cheerfully trust and acquiesce, satisfied by evident reason that no other expectation of revenue can possibly be given by freemen, and knowing from an experience uniform both on yours and on our side of the ocean that…
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