(Pic above is from this article about Burke on AmericanAffairsJournal.org)
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The Dublin-born Whig, Edmund Burke (1729-1797), get this sparkling description in Paul Johnson's acclaimed 1000+ pages of A History Of The American People (1997):
"It is a thousand pities that Edmund Burke, the greatest statesman in Britain at that time, and the only one fit to rank with Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Adams, and Madison, has not left us his reflections on the Declaration.
Oddly enough, on July 4, the day it was signed, he noted that the news from America was so disturbing 'that I courted sleep in vain.’ But Burke was at one with Jefferson, in mind and still more in spirit.
His public life was devoted to essentially a single theme—the exposure and castigation of the abuse of power. He saw the conduct of the English Ascendancy in Ireland as an abuse of power; of the rapacious English nabobs in India as an abuse of power; and finally, at the end of his life, of the revolutionary ideologues who created the Terror in France as an abuse of power.
Now, in 1776, he told parliament that the crown was abusing its power in America by 'a succession of Acts of Tyranny.’ It was 'governing by an Army’, shutting the ports, ending the fisheries, abolishing the charters, burning the towns: so, ‘you drove them into the declaration of independency’ because the abuse of power 'was more than what ought to be endured.’
Now, he scoffed, the King had ordered church services and a public fast in support of the war. In a sentence which stunned the Commons, Burke concluded: 'Till our churches are purified from this abominable service, I shall consider them, not as the temples of the Almighty, but the synagogues of Satan'. In Burke’s view, because power had been so grievously abused, America was justified in seeking independence by the sword.
And that, in essence, is exactly what the Declaration of Independence sets forth."
– from Paul Johnson, A History Of The American People (1997)
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