Edmund Burke's literary executors French Laurence and Walker King issued "Thoughts and Details on Scarcity" in 1800, three years after Burke's death in 1797. The document-reproduced in entirety here though without their informative Preface 2 -comes principally from a memorial Burke wrote to Prime Minister William Pitt in 1795, but almost half comes from other draft material, intended for the public but to be framed as letters addressed to Burke's friend Arthur Young. 3 The material began as a timely warning against interventionist measures in the face of dearth, including a locally administered minimum-wage scheme (referred to as a "tax" by Burke, because employers pay more for labor). But the interpolations from the letters are more of the nature of general political economy. The final document, "Thoughts and Details on Scarcity," then, is an admixture-"Details," the more specific facts from the memorial, including testimony of Burke the farmer, which work as illustration of the "Thoughts," formulated especially in the material that the executors had drawn from the subsequent draft letters.We have made a few very minor corrections to Burke's text, and we include most of the footnotes added by Francis Canavan for the Liberty Fund edition (Burke 1999), which relate the text to affairs of the moment. We thank Liberty Fund for their kind permission to reproduce Canavan's notes.Why do we draw attention to "Thoughts and Details on Scarcity"? Adam Smith's "liberal plan" or "liberal system" (WN, 664, 538-539) is cen-
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The French revolution split the English whigs over profound issues of principle. One section, of which Fox was the most prominent member, viewed the revolution, at least in its earlier stages, with considerable sympathy and argued that the war with France could have been avoided. The other section accepted Burke’s interpretation of the revolution and at the beginning of 1793 supported the government’s intervention in the European war. And from the middle of 1792 the possibility of a coalition between this latter section and Pitt was in the air. One factor which delayed the formation of a coalition government was the attitude of the duke of Portland, ‘the natural leader’ of the whig party. Portland, who combined pride of birth with a sense of duty, some political shrewdness and strong opinions which he expressed, when writing, with considerable fluency, seems to have inspired genuine respect and even affection amongst those who worked with him. But he was hesitant, and in the early nineties, while accepting Burke’s views on the revolution, he did not wait to split his party. The existence of the whig party, ‘a union of persons of independent minds and fortunes formed and connected together by their belief in the principles by which the revolution of 1688 was founded’, was essential, he believed, to the welfare of the country. The whig party ‘which alone is entitled to be distinguished by the name of party’, he asserted, ‘must be as eternal as I conceive the constitution of this country to be’.
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