The very same reasons which require secrecy with regard to others demand the freest communication to them.
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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Hastings has established principles of confidence and secrecy towards himself which have cut off all confidence between the Directors and their ministers, and effectually kept them at least out of the secret of their own affairs.
There remains nothing for the Directors but the shell and husk of a dry, formal, official correspondence, which neither means anything nor was intended to mean anything.
These are some of the methods by which he has defeated the purposes of the excellent institution of a recorded administration.
Notwithstanding his unwearied pains in the work of spoliation, some precious fragments are left, which we ought infinitely to value,--by which we may learn, and lament, the loss of what he has destroyed.
He claims a privilege of systematic inconstancy, a privilege of prevarication, a privilege of contradiction,--a privilege of not only changing his conduct, but the principles of his conduct, whenever it suits his occasions.
Two sorts of people inhabit the same country, as totally distinct from each other, in characters, lives, opinions, prejudices, and manners, as the inhabitants of countries most remote from each other.
Their legislator, whoever he was, (for who he was is a matter lost in the mists of a most obscure antiquity,) had it as a great leading principle of his policy to connect the people with their soil.
That bond which is one of the chief instruments of society, and which, supporting the individual, connects the species, can have no existence with them: I mean the convivial bond.
It is a great gulf fixed between you and them,--not so much that elementary gulf, but that gulf which manners, opinions, and laws have radicated in the very nature of the people.
It imposes upon us a stricter duty to guard with a firm and powerful vigilance those whose principles of conscience weaken their principles of self-defence.
If we undertake to govern the inhabitants of such a country, we must govern them upon their own principles and maxims, and not upon ours.
We must not think to force them into the narrow circle of our ideas; we must extend ours to take in their system of opinions and rites, and the necessities which result from both: all change on their part is absolutely impracticable.
We have more versatility of character and manners, and it is we who must conform.
We know what the empire of opinion is in human nature.
I had almost said that the law of opinion was human nature itself.
It is, however, the strongest principle in the composition of the frame of the human mind; and more of the happiness and unhappiness of mankind resides in that inward principle than in all external circumstances put together.
But if such is the empire of opinion even amongst us, it has a pure, unrestrained, complete, and despotic power amongst them.
He is precipitated from the proudest elevation of respect and honor to a bottomless abyss of contempt,--from glory to infamy,--from purity to pollution,--from sanctity to profanation.
No honest occupation is open to him; his children are no longer his children; their parent loses that name; the conjugal bond is dissolved.
To speak to an Indian of his caste is to speak to him of his all.
For it is singular, the caste may be lost, not only by certain voluntary crimes, but by certain involuntary sufferings, disgraces, and pollutions, that are utterly out of their power to prevent.
This, amongst a thousand other considerations, speaks to us in very authoritative language with what care and circumspection we ought to handle people so delicate.
Faults this nation may have; but God forbid we should pass judgment upon people who framed their laws and institutions prior to our insect origin of yesterday!
With all the faults of their nature and errors of their institutions, their institutions, which act so powerfully on their natures, have two material characteristics which entitle them to respect: first, great force and stability; and…
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