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 years
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