The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke: With a Portrait, and Life of the Author, Volume 4

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T. M'Lean, Haymarket, 1823 - Great Britain

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Page 216 - ... compounding all the materials of fury, havoc, and desolation into one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities of the mountains.
Page 218 - For eighteen months, without intermission, this destruction raged from the gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore ; and so completely did these masters in their art, Hyder Ali, and his more ferocious son, absolve themselves of their impious vow, that when the British armies traversed, as they did, the Carnatic for hundreds of miles in all directions, through the whole line of their march, they did not see one man, not one woman, not one child, not one four-footed beast of any description whatever....
Page 133 - He has faults ; but they are faults that, though they may in a small degree tarnish the lustre, and sometimes impede the march of his abilities, have nothing in them to extinguish the fire of great virtues. In those faults, there is no mixture of deceit, of hypocrisy, of pride, of ferocity, of complexional despotism, or want of feeling for the distresses of mankind.
Page 215 - When at length Hyder Ali found that he had to do with men who either would sign no convention, or whom no treaty and no signature could bind, and who were the determined enemies of human intercourse itself, he decreed to make the country possessed by these incorrigible and predestinated criminals a memorable example to mankind.
Page 12 - ... remedy. The very charter, which is held out to exclude parliament from correcting malversation with regard to the high trust vested in the company, is the- very thing which at once gives a title and imposes a duty on...
Page 199 - ... usury of twelve per cent, to the first overgrown principal; and has again grafted on this meliorated stock a perpetual annuity of six per cent, to take place from the year 1781. Let no man hereafter talk of the decaying energies of nature. All the acts and monuments in the records of peculation; the consolidated corruption of ages; the patterns of exemplary plunder in the heroic times of Roman iniquity, never equalled the gigantic corruption of this single act. Never did Nero, in all the insolent...
Page 223 - While they were performing this fundamental duty, whilst they were celebrating these mysteries of justice and humanity, they would have told the corps of fictitious creditors whose crimes were their claims, that they must keep an awful distance; that they must silence...
Page 167 - ... gentlemen have carried hence to enrich India ? What are the sciences they beamed out to enlighten it? What are the arts they introduced to cheer and to adorn it ? What are the religious, what the moral institutions they have taught among that people as a guide to life, or as a consolation when life is to be no more, that there is an eternal debt, a debt "still paying still to owe," which must be bound on the present generation in India, and entailed on their mortgaged posterity for ever?
Page 22 - ... have ever made, which they have not broken. Thirdly, I say, that there is not a single prince or state, who ever put any trust in the company, who is not utterly ruined ; and that none are in any degree secure or flourishing, but in the exact proportion to their settled distrust and irreconcilable enmity to this nation. These assertions are universal. I say in the full sense universal.
Page 42 - England,the destroyers of the nobility and gentry of a whole kingdom will find the best company in this nation, at a board of elegance and hospitality. Here the manufacturer and husbandman will bless the just and punctual hand, that in India has torn the cloth from the loom, or wrested the scanty portion of rice and salt from the peasant of Bengal, or wrung from him the very opium in which he forgot his oppressions and his oppressor.

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