Historical voices

We now see all over Europe, and particularly in England, the curious phenomenon of a nation looking one way, and the government the other--the one forward and the other backward.

Either, therefore, government has arrived at its dotage, and requires to be renovated, or all the occasions for exercising its wisdom have occurred.

If everything that can happen is already in precedent, legislation is at an end, and precedent, like a dictionary, determines every case.

How is it that the same persons who would proudly be thought wiser than their predecessors, appear at the same time only as the ghosts of departed wisdom?

Either the doctrine of precedents is policy to keep a man in a state of ignorance, or it is a practical confession that wisdom degenerates in governments as governments increase in age, and can only hobble along by the stilts and crutches…

In numerous instances, the precedent ought to operate as a warning, and not as an example, and requires to be shunned instead of imitated; but instead of this, precedents are taken in the lump, and put at once for constitution and for law.

Government by precedent, without any regard to the principle of the precedent, is one of the vilest systems that can be set up.

The ragged relic and the antiquated precedent, the monk and the monarch, will moulder together.

This political popery, like the ecclesiastical popery of old, has had its day, and is hastening to its exit.

They feel that he is arriving at knowledge faster than they wish, and their policy of precedents is the barometer of their fears.

They are softly leading him to the sepulchre of precedents, to deaden his faculties and call attention from the scene of revolutions.

Governments now act as if they were afraid to awaken a single reflection in man.

But by associating those precedents with a superstitious reverence for ancient things, as monks show relics and call them holy, the generality of mankind are deceived into the design.

The generality of those precedents are founded on principles and opinions, the reverse of what they ought; and the greater distance of time they are drawn from, the more they are to be suspected.

Since the revolution of America, and more so since that of France, this preaching up the doctrines of precedents, drawn from times and circumstances antecedent to those events, has been the studied practice of the English government.

Almost every case must now be determined by some precedent, be that precedent good or bad, or whether it properly applies or not; and the practice is become so general as to suggest a suspicion, that it proceeds from a deeper policy than…

The attention of the government of England (for I rather choose to call it by this name than the English government) appears, since its political connection with Germany, to have been so completely engrossed and absorbed by foreign…

From the want of a constitution in England to restrain and regulate the wild impulse of power, many of the laws are irrational and tyrannical, and the administration of them vague and problematical.

Burke asserts, are not founded on the Rights of Man, and are founded on any rights at all, they consequently must be founded on the right of something that is not man.

Burke is such a bold presumer, and advances his assertions and his premises with such a deficiency of judgment, that, without troubling ourselves about principles of philosophy or politics, the mere logical conclusions they produce, are…

No wonder, then, that a machine of government so advantageous to the advocates of a court, should be so triumphantly extolled!

I cannot believe that any nation, reasoning on its own rights, would have thought of calling these things a constitution, if the cry of constitution had not been set up by the government.

Election, in this case, becomes separated from representation, and the candidates are candidates for despotism.

It is not because a part of the government is elective, that makes it less a despotism, if the persons so elected possess afterwards, as a parliament, unlimited powers.