ears
after his speech the British North America Act should have given his
dreams full substance.

Ireland had always a place apart in Burke's affections, and when he
first entered the House of Commons he admitted that uppermost in his
thoughts was the desire to assist its freedom. He saw that here, as in
America, no man will be argued into slavery. A government which defied
the fundamental impulses of men was bound to court disaster. How could
it seek security where it defied the desires of the vast majority of its
subjects? Why is the Irish Catholic to have less justice than the
Catholic of Quebec or the Indian Mohammedan? The system of Protestant
control, he said in the _Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe_ (1792), was
"well fitted for the oppression, impoverishment and degradation of a
people, and the debasement in them of human nature itself." The
Catholics paid their taxes; they served with glory in the army and navy.
Yet they were denied a share in the commonwealth. "Common sense," he
said, "and common justice dictate ... some sort of compensation to a
people for their slavery." The British Constitution was not made "for
great, general and proscriptive exclusions; sooner or later it will
destroy them, or they will destroy the constitution." The argument that
the body of Catholics was prone to sedition was no reason to oppress
them. "No man will assert seriously," he said, "that when people are of
a turbulent spirit the best way to keep them in order is to furnish them
with something to complain of." The advantages of subjects were, as he
urged, their right; and a wise government would regard "all their
reasonable wishes as so many claims." To neglect them was to have a
nation full of uneasiness; and the end was bound to be disaster.

There is nothing more noble in Burke's career than his long attempt to
mitigate the evils of Company rule in India. Research may well have
shown that in some details he pressed the case too far; yet nothing has
so far come to light to cast doubt upon the principles he there
maintained. 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 complacency. 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
imp