The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 12 (of 12)
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 12 (of 12)
Volume 12 of Edmund Burke's collected works contains the devastating political speeches he delivered during the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, former Governor-General of Bengal. These orations represent one of the most extraordinary moments in British legal and political history: a sitting parliamentarian using the full weight of the law to hold the nation's highest colonial administrator accountable for crimes committed against the Indian nobility. Burke's rhetoric is incandescent, laying bare the fraudulent treaties, the coerced land seizures, and the systematic oppression of Indian rulers that marked Hastings' governorship. Yet this is more than a historical document. It is an argument about the soul of empire, about whether power can exist without justice, about the moral obligations of rulers to the ruled. Burke's passionate defense of the Nabob of Oudh and the Indian aristocracy reads as an early, audacious critique of colonial violence. These speeches failed to convict Hastings, but they changed how the British Empire understood itself, and they remain essential reading for anyone interested in the moral foundations of political power.
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“In the court of Nero, a person of learning, of unquestioned merit, and of unsuspected loyalty, was put to death for no other reason, than that he had a pedantic countenance which displeased the emperor. This very monster of mankind appeared in the beginning of his reign to be a person of virtue. Many of the greatest tyrants on the records of history have begun their reigns in the fairest manner. But the truth is, this unnatural power corrupts both the heart and the understanding. And to prevent the least hope of amendment, a king is ever surrounded by a crowd of infamous flatterers, who find their account in keeping him from the least light of reason, till all ideas of rectitude and justice are utterly erased from his mind. When Alexander had in his fury inhumanly butchered one of his best friends and bravest captains; on the return of reason he began to conceive an horror suitable to the guilt of such a murder. In this juncture his council came to his assistance. But what did his council? They found him out a philosopher who gave him comfort. And in what manner did this philosopher comfort him for the loss of such a man, and heal his conscience, flagrant with the smart of such a crime? You have the matter at length in Plutarch. He told him, "that let a sovereign do what he wilt, all his actions are just and lawful, because they are his.””
— Edmund Burke
“On considering political societies, their origin, their constitution, and their effects, I have sometimes been in a good deal more than doubt, whether the Creator did ever really intend man for a state of happiness. He has mixed in his cup a number of natural evils, (in spite of the boasts of stoicism they are evils,) and every endeavor which the art and policy of mankind has used from the beginning of the world to this day, in order to alleviate or cure them, has only served to introduce new mischiefs, or to aggravate and inflame the old. Besides this, the mind of man itself is too active and restless a principle ever to settle on the true point of quiet. It discovers every day some craving want in a body, which really wants but little.””
— Edmund Burke
“There is a sort of gloss upon ingenious falsehoods that dazzles the imagination, but which neither belongs to, nor becomes the sober aspect of truth.””
— Edmund Burke
“There is an air of plausibility which accompanies vulgar reasonings and notions, taken from the beaten circle of ordinary experience, that is admirably suited to the narrow capacities of some, and to the laziness of others.””
— Edmund Burke
