The second consideration in the Gentoo institutions is their beneficial effects, moral and civil.
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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This alone furnishes full proof that there must be some powerful influence resulting from them beyond all our little fashionable theories upon such subjects.
They have existed in spite of Mahomedan and Portuguese bigotry,--in spite of Tartarian and Arabian tyranny,--in spite of all the fury of successive foreign conquest,--in spite of a more formidable foe, the avarice of the English dominion.
They have stood firm on their ancient base; they have cast their roots deep in their native soil,--perhaps because they have never spread them anywhere else than in their native soil.
Their stability has been proved by their holding on an uniform tenor for a duration commensurate to all the empires with which history has made us acquainted; and they still exist in a green old age, with all the reverence of antiquity…
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…
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!
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.
Tyranny is therefore armed against them with a greater variety of weapons than are found in its ordinary stores.
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.
But the rule of caste has, with them, given one power more to fortune than the manners of any other nation were ever known to do.
To speak to an Indian of his caste is to speak to him of his all.
No honest occupation is open to him; his children are no longer his children; their parent loses that name; the conjugal bond is dissolved.
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.
But if such is the empire of opinion even amongst us, it has a pure, unrestrained, complete, and despotic power amongst them.
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.
I had almost said that the law of opinion was human nature itself.
We know what the empire of opinion is in human nature.
We have more versatility of character and manners, and it is we who must conform.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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