m, far from the active world, and too
broken in health to influence policy either way, wrote a powerful plea
for it; but a strong group of Whig magnates, themselves wealthy absentee
proprietors of Irish land, signed a vehement remonstrance which carried
the day against it, and the author of this remonstrance, of all men in
the world, was the Irishman Burke, who, owning not an acre of Irish land
himself, devoted all his transcendent talents, all the subtlety and
variety of his reasoning, to clothing the selfish greed of others with
the garb of an enlightened patriotism.

He was wrong fundamentally about Ireland, and only superficially right
about America. In the terms of this celebrated remonstrance, as
illuminated by his own private correspondence, his consistency is
revealed. By the very nature of things, he maintained, the central
Parliament of a great heterogeneous Empire must exercise a supreme
superintending power and regulate the polity and economy of the several
parts as they relate to one another, a principle which, of course, would
have justified the taxation of America, and which, save on the ground of
expediency alone, he would certainly have applied to America. The
proximity of Ireland helped his logic, and surely logic was never
distorted to stranger ends. The "ordinary residence" of the threatened
Irish landowners was in England, "to which country they were attached,
not only by the ties of birth and early habit, but also by those of
indisputable public duties," as though these facts did not constitute in
themselves a damning satire on the system of Irish Government. They were
to be "fined" for living in England, as though that fine were not the
most just and politic which could be conceived, if it went even an inch
towards establishing the principle that Ireland's affairs were the
business of responsible resident Irishmen, or towards the further
principle, enshrined in Drummond's celebrated phrase of seventy years
later in regard to the agrarian system which these Whig noblemen shared
in founding, that "property has its duties as well as its rights."
Finally, argued Burke, heaping irony upon irony, the tax would lead
directly to the "separation" of the two Kingdoms both in interest and
affection. The Colonies would follow the Irish example, and thus a
principle of disunion and separation would pervade the whole Empire; the
bonds of common interest, knowledge, and sympathy which now knit it
together would