Burke on Ireland; Mass. SJC Rules Southborough Civility Code Violates MA Constitution; Downeast Maine Flagpole Proposal
Readers, in honor of Evacuation Day/St. Patrick's Day on Friday, and the fact that Plymouth County is disproportionately Irish, typically with some of the most Irish census designated places (CDPs) in the entire country (depending on the census, typically in Marshfield or Scituate), we welcome as our guest the great Irish orator, the Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke MP (who was a Whig, not a Tory!), talking on the subject of Ireland.
Burke, who was of Irish origin, represented English seats in the old, unreformed House of Commons — including Bristol, at that time, the second-most important city in Britain. He lost that seat after crossing his voters on the issue of trade with Ireland; Burke essentially told them he owed them his judgment, not to represent their views in a plebiscitary fashion. It was an important speech in terms of the theory of representative democracy, but it was bad politics, and Burke was not reelected to that seat.
( Edmund Burke; photo credit — Wikipedia. )
In the first quotation below, Burke is writing in the mid-1760s, the era of the Stamp Act Crisis, and the high tide of a certain type of Whig thought of which Burke was a part, that emphasized equality under the law and the supremacy of the same. Despite the antiquated language (“Papists” are Roman Catholics), he is actually making a case below for toleration and mutual respect between Protestants and Catholics.
This reflected the general tenor of the Age of Enlightenment, which, after the titanic convulsions of the Age of Reformation in the 16th and 17th centuries, had developed the critical idea of toleration: that we may disagree profoundly, including on matters of conscience, without reverting to the kinds of Total War that raged across Europe in the 1500s and 1600s, generally on Protestant v. Catholic lines and with Great Power politics thrown in for good measure. Indeed, the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), between Protestants and Catholics and most European powers, killed about a third of the German population in this period; wolves returned en masse to parts of Germany. It was the outbreak of this war that in part convinced the Pilgrims to leave The Netherlands in 1620 (the Protestant Dutch, for their part, had already been engaged in an epochal, decades-long revolt against the Catholic Spanish Monarchy, their nominal lords, since 1580).
Toleration arose as an idea in response to this cataclysmic scale of destruction, and it certainly flourished in the cosmopolitan environment of 18th century London or Amsterdam or Philadelphia. However, in Ireland, the Reformation never really ended; the deep and bitter sectarian divides on that island for complicated reasons remained deep fault lines well into the present age.
Thus, Burke is writing below, in the 1760s, not only as an Enlightenment intellectual and man of letters, but also as someone who is deeply concerned, at a practical level, with public problems:
“But I flatter myself that not a few will be found who do not think that the names of Protestant and Papist can make any change in the nature of essential justice. Such men will not allow that to be proper treatment to the one of these denominations which would be cruelty to the other, and which converts its very crime into the instrument of its defence: they will hardly persuade themselves that what was bad policy in France can be good in Ireland, or that what was intolerable injustice in an arbitrary monarch becomes, only by being more extended and more violent, an equitable procedure in a country professing to be governed by law….
It has been shown, I hope with sufficient evidence, that a constitution against the interest of the many is rather of the nature of a grievance than of a law; that of all grievances it is the most weighty and important; that it is made without due authority, against all the acknowledged principles of jurisprudence.”
– Fragments of a Tract Relative To the Laws Against Popery in Ireland, c. 1765.
Let’s turn to the second quote I wished to include, which is written three decades later, and which is both clearer and considerably darker, reflecting the outbreak of the French Revolution, in 1789, and war between the Revolutionary French Republic and the rest of Europe in 1792-93. Burke, despite his support for the American Revolutionaries as, in his view, merely attempting to claim their just rights and ancient liberties as freeborn Britons, was deeply suspicious of the French Revolution, arguing that it contained what might later be called, at the risk of an ahistorical comparison, “totalitarian” tendencies; indeed, it could be argued that Burke’s prediction that the French Revolution would end in a military dictatorship was borne out in part in the person of Bonaparte.
With respect to Ireland, Burke’s fears were precisely that Jacobinism, or French revolutionary republican radicalism, would sweep across the incredibly oppressed Catholic inhabitants of Ireland; this led him, paradoxically, to an appreciation of the deep necessity of reform on that island:
“There is no hope for the body of the people of Ireland, as long as those who are in power with you shall make it the great object of their policy to propagate an opinion on this side of the water [i.e. in England] that the mass of their countrymen are not to be trusted by their government, and that the only hold which England has upon Ireland consists in preserving a certain very small number of gentlemen in full possession of a monopoly of that kingdom. This system has disgusted many others besides Catholics and Dissenters1.”
– A Letter On the Affairs of Ireland, 1797.
Meanwhile, back in this century —
Mass. SJC Decision Holds That “Discourteous” Speech Directed at Government Officials Is Protected By the Mass. Constitution
(BOSTON) — In a ruling with implications for all 351 Towns and Cities in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) unanimously held that “discourteous, rude, disrespectful, or personal speech about government officials and governmental actions” is protected under the Constitution of Massachusetts.