ABSTRACT
“From the part Mr. Burke took in the American Revolution,” declared Thomas Paine in 1791, “it was natural that I should consider him a friend to mankind” (Paine 1984: 35). Edmund Burke had defended American rights in the 1760s and 1770s; as a new MP, for example, he had played a major part in organizing the repeal of the infamous Stamp Act. Not only that; he had supported relief from political disabilities of Catholics and Protestant Dissenters as well. As an Anglo-Irish outsider from Dublin, Burke had reasons for sympathy with the excluded and oppressed. His Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), with its concessions to popular representation, established the Rockingham Whigs as public critics of arbitrary power. Burke and his companions regarded Parliament, not the king, as the nation’s voice.
