There is nothing more noble in Burke's career than his long attempt to mitigate the evils of Company rule in India.
Harold J. Laski
The Public Record
Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.
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He was the first English statesman fully to understand the moral import of the problem of subject races; and if he did not make impossible the Joseph Sedleys of the future, at least he flung an eternal challenge to their malignant…
He did not ask the abandonment of British dominion in India, though he may have doubted the wisdom of its conquest.
All that he insisted upon was this, that in imperial adventure the conquering race must abide by a moral code.
A lie was a lie whether its victim be black or white.
The European must respect the powers and rights of the Hindu as he would be compelled by law to respect them in his own State.
The English youth in India drink the intoxicating draught of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they are ripe in principle, neither nature nor reason have any…
The consequences of their conduct, which in good minds (and many of theirs are probably such) might produce penitence or amendment, are unable to pursue the rapidity of their flight.
But there has never, in any language, been drawn a clearer picture of the danger implicit in imperial adventure.
He knew that cruelty abroad is the parent of a later cruelty at home.
He denied that the government of subject races can be regarded as a commercial transaction.
Its problem was not to secure dividends but to accomplish moral benefit.
It was easy to destroy; creation was impossible.
Political philosophy was nothing for him but accurate generalization from experience; and he held the presumption to be against novelty.
While he did not belittle the value of reason, he was always impressed by the immense part played by prejudice in the determination of policy.
He had no doubt that property was a rightful index to power; and to disturb prescription seemed to him the opening of the flood gates.
Nothing was more alien from Burke's temper than deductive thinking in politics.
Prudence is not only first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the standard of them all." Nor did he hesitate to draw the obvious conclusion.
He supported almost with passion the ending of that iniquitous system by which the enfranchisement of revenue officers gave government a corrupt reservoir of electoral support.
He was against the demand for shorter Parliaments on the excellent ground that the elections would be more corrupt and the Commons less responsible.
He opposed the remedy of a Place Bill for the good and sufficient reason that it gave the executive an interest against the legislature.
He would not, as in the great speech at Bristol (1774), accept the doctrine that a member of Parliament was a mere delegate of his constituents rather than a representative of his own convictions.
Broadly, he was protesting against natural right in the name of expediency.
Government, for him, was the general harmony of diverse interests; and the continual adjustments and exquisite modifications of which it stood in need were admirably discovered in the existing system.
But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
