n speeches are the true text-book for colonial
administration. He put aside the empty plea of right which satisfied
legal pedants like George Grenville. What moved him was the tragic
fashion in which men clung to the shadow of a power they could not
maintain instead of searching for the roots of freedom. He never
concealed from himself that the success of America was bound up with the
maintenance of English liberties. "Armies," he said many years later,
"first victorious over Englishmen, in a conflict for English
constitutional rights and privileges, and afterwards habituated (though
in America) to keep an English people in a state of abject subjection,
would prove fatal in the end to the liberties of England itself." He had
firm hold of that insidious danger which belittles freedom itself in the
interest of curtailing some special desire. "In order to prove that the
Americans have no right to their liberties," he said in the famous
_Speech on Conciliation with America_ (1775), "we are every day
endeavoring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our
own." The way for the later despotism of the younger Pitt, was, as Burke
saw, prepared by those who persuaded Englishmen of the paltry character
of the American contest. His own receipt was sounder. In the _Speech on
American Taxation_ (1774) he had riddled the view that the fiscal
methods of Lord North were likely to succeed. The true method was to
find a way of peace. "Nobody shall persuade me," he told a hostile House
of Commons, "when a whole people are concerned that acts of lenity are
not means of conciliation." "Magnanimity in politics," he said in the
next year, "is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and
little minds go ill together." He did not know, in the most superb of
all his maxims, how to draw up an indictment against a whole people. He
would win the colonies by binding them to England with the ties of
freedom. "The question with me," he said, "is not whether you have a
right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your
interest to make them happy." The problem, in fact, was one not of
abstract right but of expediency; and nothing could be lost by
satisfying American desire. Save for Johnson and Gibbon, that was
apparent to every first-class mind in England. But the obstinate king
prevailed; and Burke's great protest remained no more than material for
the legislation of the future. Yet it was something that ninety y