Edmund Burke was born at Dublin on the first of January, 1730.  His father was an attorney, who had fifteen children, of whom all but four died in their youth.  Edmund, the second son, being of delicate health in his childhood, was taught at home and at his grandfather’s house in the country before he was sent with his two brothers Garrett and Richard to a school at Ballitore, under Abraham Shackleton, a member of the Society of Friends.  For nearly forty years afterwards Burke paid an annual vi

Mr. Speaker,—In every complicated Constitution (and every free Constitution is complicated) cases will arise, when the several orders of the State will clash with one another, and disputes will arise about the limits of their several rights and privileges.  It may be almost impossible to reconcile them. Carry the principle on by which you expelled Mr. Wilkes, there is not a man in the House, hardly a man in the nation, who may not be disqualified.  That this House should have no power of expulsi

I have always understood that a superintendence over the doctrines, as well as the proceedings, of the courts of justice, was a principal object of the constitution of this House; that you were to watch at once over the lawyer and the law; that there should he an orthodox faith as well as proper works: and I have always looked with a degree of reverence and admiration on this mode of superintendence.  For being totally disengaged from the detail of juridical practice, we come to something, perha

It is always to be lamented when men are driven to search into the foundations of the commonwealth.  It is certainly necessary to resort to the theory of your government whenever you propose any alteration in the frame of it, whether that alteration means the revival of some former antiquated and forsaken constitution of state, or the introduction of some new improvement in the commonwealth.  The object of our deliberation is, to promote the good purposes for which elections have been instituted

Mr. Speaker,—We have now discovered, at the close of the eighteenth century, that the Constitution of England, which for a series of ages had been the proud distinction of this country, always the admiration, and sometimes the envy, of the wise and learned in every other nation—we have discovered that this boasted Constitution, in the most boasted part of it, is a gross imposition upon the understanding of mankind, an insult to their feelings, and acting by contrivances destructive to the best a