Madras High Court, the central courts of justice for the India state of Tamil Nadu, located in Madras (Chennai) on the southeastern coast of India. It was built in 1892 following Queen Victoria’s order establishing high courts in the three Presidency towns of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta on 26th June, 1862. The building was damaged by a German battleship on 22nd September 1914 during the Bombardment of Madras.
AS long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have; the more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience.
Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil.* They may have it from Spain, they may have it from Prussia. But, until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you. It is the spirit of the English constitution, which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even down to the minutest member.
This phrase and indeed the substance of Burke’s argument was recalled in his final speech to the Commons by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in 1937. The speech can be read and heard online at The British Library.
Précis
The eighteenth-century MP Edmund Burke urged London to remember that what held Britain’s colonies together all around the world was not armies or laws, but the fact that the colonies saw Britain as a beacon of liberty in a world where colonies were more usually expected to serve the mother country like a slave. (54 / 60 words)
