Burke Manuscript

Burke Manuscript: Page 266

Transcript

We should not wonder at all now, if the Medical Comforts ledger balanced well, and if it showed that the people were supplied with a large quantity of comforts -particularly stimulants? For immigrants newly landing in a strange country, 16000 miles away from all their friends, require to be stimulated, and suppose the stimulants should be administered by substitute, bless you, what’s the odds, didn’t it all go in the Tally?

You know, I think there is nothing so pleasant to the enquiring mind as a devoted official; a pleasant well spoken official, an obliging official and a particularly kind official to old cripples and people in want. That is the sort of man one admires. And when such a person has at his disposal large sums of money and has a full discretion as to how to use it, it must be nice to meet a man who thinks this money is all his own, and he the charitable donor of doles to the poor, old and decrepit wretches, whom he finds pleasure in meeting with a smile and sending away delighted?

That is the sort of man one likes. But when one meets an upstart adventurer snob, who thinks he is the State, or that the State has endowed him with the power of giving curt answers, and using domineering and insulting language to poor beings forced by circumstances to put up with such airs, one feels a sort of craving to administer a well justified chastisement.

But what is this all about? Nobody knows? Why there is no meaning in it. One feels certain nobody will ever understand the allusions and will simply brand the writer a lunatic. Well. He must, like the Australian cricketers, take his gravel.