by Edmund Burke
In putting this parallel, I take it for granted that we can stand for this short time very clear of our party distinctions.... 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 is, however, impossible not to observe with some concern, that there are many also of a different disposition—a number of persons whose minds are so formed that they find the communion of religion to be a close and an endearing tie, and their country to be no bond at all—to whom common altars are a better relation than common habitations and a common civil interest—whose hearts are touched with the distresses of foreigners, and are abundantly awake to all the tenderness of human feeling on such an occasion, even at the moment that they are inflicting the very same distresses, or worse, on their fellow-citizens, without the least sting of compassion or remorse. To commiserate the distresses of all men suffering innocently, perhaps meritoriously, is generous, and very agreeable to the better part of our nature—a disposition that ought by all means to be cherished. But to transfer humanity from its natural basis, our legitimate and home-bred connections—to lose all feeling for those who have grown up by our sides, in our eyes, the benefit of whose cares and labors we have partaken from our birth, and meretriciously to hunt abroad after foreign affections, is such a disarrangement of the whole system of our duties, that I do not know whether benevolence so displaced is not almost the same thing as destroyed, or what effect bigotry could have produced that is more fatal to society. This no one could help observing, who has seen our doors kindly and bountifully thrown open to foreign sufferers for conscience, whilst through the same ports were issuing fugitives of our own, driven from their country for a cause which to an indifferent person would seem to be exactly similar, whilst we stood by, without any sense of the impropriety of this extraordinary scene, accusing and practising injustice.... These observations, which are a digression, but hardly, I think, can be considered as a departure from the subject, have detained us some time: we will now come more directly to our purpose.
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, against the opinions of all the great lights in that science; and that such is the tacit sense even of those who act in the most contrary manner. These points are, indeed, so evident, that I apprehend the abettors of the penal system will ground their defence on an admission, and not on a denial of them. They will lay it down as a principle, that the Protestant religion is a thing beneficial for the whole community, as well in its civil interests as in those of a superior order. From thence they will argue, that, the end being essentially beneficial, the means become instrumentally so; that these penalties and incapacities are not final causes of the law, but only a discipline to bring over a deluded people to their real interest, and therefore, though they may be harsh in their operation, they will be pleasant in their effects; and be they what they will, they cannot be considered as a very extraordinary hardship, as it is in the power of the sufferer to free himself when he pleases, and that only by converting to a better religion....
I shall be very short, without being, I think, the less satisfactory, in my answer to these topics, because they never can be urged from a conviction of their validity, and are, indeed, only the usual and impotent struggles of those who are unwilling to abandon a practice which they are unable to defend. First, then, I observe, that, if the principle of their final and beneficial intention be admitted as a just ground for such proceedings, there never was, in the blamable sense of the word, nor ever can be, such a thing as a religious persecution in the world. Such an intention is pretended by all men—who all not only insist that their religion has the sanction of Heaven, but is likewise, and for that reason, the best and most convenient to human society. All religious persecution, Mr. Bayle well observes, is grounded upon a miserable petitio principii. You are wrong, I am right; you must come over to me, or you must suffer. Let me add, that the great inlet by which a color for oppression has entered into the world is by one man’s pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another, and by claiming a right to use what means he thinks proper in order to bring him to a sense of it. It is the ordinary and trite sophism of oppression. But there is not yet such a convenient ductility in the human understanding as to make us capable of being persuaded that men can possibly mean the ultimate good of the whole society by rendering miserable for a century together the greater part of it—or that any one has such a reversionary benevolence as seriously to intend the remote good of a late posterity, who can give up the present enjoyment which every honest man must have in the happiness of his contemporaries. Everybody is satisfied that a conservation and secure enjoyment of our natural rights is the great and ultimate purpose of civil society, and that therefore all forms whatsoever of government are only good as they are subservient to that purpose to which they are entirely subordinate. Now to aim at the establishment of any form of government by sacrificing what is the substance of it, to take away or at least to suspend the rights of Nature in order to an approved system for the protection of them, and for the sake of that about which men must dispute forever to postpone those things about which they have no controversy at all, and this not in minute and subordinate, but large and principal objects, is a procedure as preposterous and absurd in argument as it is oppressive and cruel in its effect. For the Protestant religion, nor (I speak it with reverence, I am sure) the truth of our common Christianity, is not so clear as this proposition—that all men, at least the majority of men in the society, ought to enjoy the common advantages of it. You fall, therefore, into a double error: first, you incur a certain mischief for an advantage which is comparatively problematical, even though you were sure of obtaining it; secondly, whatever the proposed advantage may be, were it of a certain nature, the attainment of it is by no means certain; and such deep gaming for stakes so valuable ought not to be admitted: the risk is of too much consequence to society. If no other country furnished examples of this risk, yet our laws and our country are enough fully to demonstrate the fact: Ireland, after almost a century of persecution, is at this hour full of penalties and full of Papists....
Now as to the other point, that the objects of these laws suffer voluntarily : this seems to me to be an insult rather than an argument. For, besides that it totally annihilates every characteristic and therefore every faulty idea of persecution, just as the former does, it supposes, what is false in fact, that it is in a man’s moral power to change his religion whenever his convenience requires it. If he be beforehand satisfied that your opinion is better than his, he will voluntarily come over to you, and without compulsion, and then your law would be unnecessary; but if he is not so convinced, he must know that it is his duty in this point to sacrifice his interest here to his opinion of his eternal happiness, else he could have in reality no religion at all. In the former case, therefore, as your law would be unnecessary, in the latter it would be persecuting: that is, it would put your penalty and his ideas of duty in the opposite scales; which is, or I know not what is, the precise idea of persecution. If, then, you require a renunciation of his conscience, as a preliminary to his admission to the rights of society, you annex, morally speaking, an impossible condition to it. In this case, in the language of reason and jurisprudence, the condition would be void, and the gift absolute; as th
e practice runs, it is to establish the condition, and to withhold the benefit. The suffering is, then, not voluntary....
The second head upon which I propose to consider those statutes with regard to their object, and which is the next in importance to the magnitude, and of almost equal concern in the inquiry into the justice of these laws, is its possession. It is proper to recollect that this religion, which is so persecuted in its members, is the old religion of the country, and the once established religion of the state—the very same which had for centuries received the countenance and sanction of the laws, and from which it would at one time have been highly penal to have dissented. In proportion as mankind has become enlightened, the idea of religious persecution, under any circumstances, has been almost universally exploded by all good and thinking men. The only faint shadow of difficulty which remains is concerning the introduction of new opinions. Experience has shown, that, if it has been favorable to the cause of truth, it has not been always conducive to the peace of society. Though a new religious sect should even be totally free in itself from any tumultuous and disorderly zeal, which, however, is rarely the case, it has a tendency to create a resistance from the establishment in possession, productive of great disorders, and thus becomes, innocently indeed, but yet very certainly, the cause of the bitterest dissensions in the commonwealth. To a mind not thoroughly saturated with the tolerating maxims of the Gospel, a preventive persecution, on such principles, might come recommended by strong, and, apparently, no immoral motives of policy, whilst yet the contagion was recent, and had laid hold but on a few persons. The truth is, these politics are rotten and hollow at bottom, as all that are founded upon any however minute a degree of positive injustice must ever be. But they are specious, and sufficiently so to delude a man of sense and of integrity. But it is quite otherwise with the attempt to eradicate by violence a widespreading and established religious opinion. If the people are in an error, to inform them is not only fair, but charitable; to drive them is a strain of the most manifest injustice. If not the right, the presumption, at least, is ever on the side of possession. Are they mistaken? If it does not fully justify them, it is a great alleviation of guilt, which may be mingled with their misfortune, that the error is none of their forging—that they received it on as good a footing as they can receive your laws and your legislative authority, because it was handed down to them from their ancestors. The opinion may be erroneous, but the principle is undoubtedly right; and you punish them for acting upon a principle which of all others is perhaps the most necessary for preserving society, an implicit admiration and adherence to the establishments of their forefathers.
If, indeed, the legislative authority was on all hands admitted to be the ground of religious persuasion, I should readily allow that dissent would be rebellion. In this case it would make no difference whether the opinion was sucked in with the milk or imbibed yesterday; because the same legislative authority which had settled could destroy it with all the power of a creator over his creature. But this doctrine is universally disowned, and for a very plain reason. Religion, to have any force on men’s understandings, indeed to exist at all, must be supposed paramount to laws, and independent for its substance upon any human institution—else it would be the absurdest thing in the world, an acknowledged cheat. Religion, therefore, is not believed because the laws have established it, but it is established because the leading part of the community have previously believed it to be true....
However, we are warranted to go thus far.The people often actually do (and perhaps they cannot in general do better) take their religion, not on the coercive, which is impossible, but on the influencing authority of their governors, as wise and informed men. But if they once take a religion on the word of the state, they cannot in common sense do so a second time, unless they have some concurrent reason for it. The prejudice in favor of your wisdom is shook by your change. You confess that you have been wrong, and yet you would pretend to dictate by your sole authority ; whereas you disengage the mind by embarrassing it. For why should I prefer your opinion of to-day to your persuasion of yesterday? If we must resort to prepossessions for the ground of opinion, it is in the nature of man rather to defer to the wisdom of times past, whose weakness is not before his eyes, than to the present, of whose imbecility he has daily experience. Veneration of antiquity is congenial to the human mind. When, therefore, an establishment would persecute an opinion in possession, it sets against it all the powerful prejudices of human nature. It even sets its own authority, when it is of most weight, against itself in that very circumstance in which it must necessarily have the least; and it opposes the stable prejudice of time against a new opinion founded on mutability : a consideration that must render compulsion in such a case the more grievous, as there is no security, that, when the mind is settled in the new opinion, it may not be obliged to give place to one that is still newer, or even to a return of the old. But when an ancient establishment begins early to persecute an innovation, it stands upon quite other grounds, and it has all the prejudices and presumptions on its side. It puts its own authority, not only of compulsion, but prepossession, the veneration of past age, as well as the activity of the present time, against the opinion only of a private man or set of men. If there be no reason, there is at least some consistency in its proceedings. Commanding to constancy, it does nothing but that of which it sets an example itself. But an opinion at once new and persecuting is a monster; because, in the very instant in which it takes a liberty of change, it does not leave to you even a liberty of perseverance.
Is, then, no improvement to be brought into society? Undoubtedly; but not by compulsion—but by encouragement—but by countenance, favor, privileges, which are powerful, and are lawful instruments. The coercive authority of the state is limited to what is necessary for its existence....
But, say the abettors of our penal laws, this old possessed superstition is such in its principles, that society, on its general principles, cannot subsist along with it. Could a man think such an objection possible, if he had not actually heard it made—an objection contradicted, not by hypothetical reasonings, but the clear evidence of the most decisive facts? Society not only exists, but flourishes at this hour, with this superstition, in many countries, under every form of government—in some established, in some tolerated, in others upon an equal footing. And was there no civil society at all in these kingdoms before the Reformation? To say it was not as well constituted as it ought to be is saying nothing at all to the purpose; for that assertion evidently regards improvements, not existence. It certainly did then exist; and it as certainly then was at least as much to the advantage of a very great part of society as what we have brought in the place of it: which is, indeed, a great blessing to those who have profited of the change; but to all the rest, as we have wrought, that is, by blending general persecution with partial reformation, it is the very reverse. We found the people heretics and idolaters; we have, by way of improving their condition, rendered them slaves and beggars: they remain in all the misfortune of their old errors, and all the superadded misery of their recent punishment. They were happy enough, in their opinion at least, before the change; what benefits society then had, they partook of them all. They are now excluded from those benefits; and, so far as civil society comprehends them, and as we have managed the matter, our persecutions are so far from being necessary to its existence, that our very reformation is made in a degree noxious. If this be improvement, truly I know not what can be called a depravation of society....