I not only charge him with being guilty of a thousand crimes, but I assert that there is not a soldier or a civil servant in India whose culpable acts are not owing to this man's example, connivance, and protection.
Burke claims that the actions of soldiers and civil servants in India are a direct result of the leader's corrupt influence.
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More from Edmund Burke
But supposing they had ranked as they ought to do, and as with us they do actually, the sides of sick-beds are not the academies for forming statesmen and legislators.
If all the absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they are conversant, we should have no law and no religion left in the world.
When such an unwarrantable maxim is once established, that no throne is lawful but the elective, no one act of the princes who preceded this era of fictitious election can be valid.
They look upon the legal hereditary succession of their crown as among their rights, not as among their wrongs,--as a benefit, not as a grievance,--as a security for their liberty, not as a badge of servitude.
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