Excerpt from A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol When Edmund Burke died in 1797, George Canning wrote to one of Lord Malmesbury's embassy: There is but one event, but that is an event for the world, Burke is dead. He is the man that will mark this age, marked as it is in itself by events, to all time. 1 During the twenty-nine years from 1765 to 17 94, in which Burke was a member of the House of Commons, he was actively interested in every measure of constitutional and colonial importance. As a political pamphleteer and legislator, he helped to remove the unjust restrictions from Ireland's commerce; to grant the privileges of citizenship to Roman Catholics; to preserve the independence of the represen tatives of the people in Parliament from the unconsti tutional influence of the King; and to protect the King and the Church from the destructive influence of the French Revolutionists. His greatest work was in dis cussing and determining the relation of the imperial government to the colonies, both in the case of the Americans, who claimed their rights as Englishmen, and of the people of India whose sufferings from English injustice were scarcely known in England. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.