Burke

EDMUND BURKE

Burke, Edmund (1729-97), British statesman and orator, who championed many human rights causes and brought attention to them through his eloquent speeches. Burke was born in Dublin and educated at Trinity College. He studied law briefly in London before embarking on a literary career. His first important work was Vindication of Natural Society (1756), a satire ridiculing the reasoning of the British statesman Henry Bolingbroke. This work, published anonymously, attracted considerable attention. Soon afterward he published an essay, The Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). The following year he began a 30-year association with The Annual Register, a British yearbook.

After 1761, when he became private secretary to the British chief secretary for Ireland, William Hamilton (1729-96), he demonstrated his aptitude for political service. Four years later he became private secretary to the new British prime minister Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2d marquis of Rockingham, and in 1766 Burke was elected as a Whig to Parliament. Almost immediately Burke sought repeal of the Stamp Act. In a pamphlet, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), and in two speeches, "On American Taxation" (1774) and "Conciliation with America" (1775), he urged justice and conciliation toward the American colonies. Burke took a deep interest in India and advocated a reversal of the British policy that allowed the East India Co. to exploit the population of that country. On Feb. 15, 1788, Burke began a four-day-long opening speech in Westminster Hall in the unsuccessful impeachment proceedings against the statesman and colonial administrator Warren Hastings for high crimes and misdemeanors committed in India. Although Hastings was acquitted after a trial that lasted seven years, Burke had made the English aware of the oppression in India.

Burke later appeared as the champion of the feudal order in Europe, with the publication of Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). The text, which was read throughout Europe, encouraged European rulers in their hostility to the French Revolution. Burke became more and more vehement in his denunciation of the French Revolution as time went on.

Burke retired from Parliament in 1794, after a career remarkable for its laborious, earnest, and brilliant discharge of duties.

Wright of Derby – Cavern Near Naples