What! a qualification on the indefeasible rights of men?
Edmund Burke: “What! a qualification on the indefeasible rights of men?”
Editor's note · Context
Burke rhetorically questions the French revolutionaries' imposition of qualifications on voting rights, which contradicts their stated principle of the indefeasible rights of men.
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Governments must be abused and deranged indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past.
Who could flatter himself that these men, suddenly, and as it were by enchantment, snatched from the humblest rank of subordination, would not be intoxicated with their unprepared greatness?
The House of Lords, for instance, is not morally competent to dissolve the House of Commons,--no, nor even to dissolve itself, nor to abdicate, if it would, its portion in the legislature of the kingdom.
Do they mean to attaint and disable backwards all the kings that have reigned before the Revolution, and consequently to stain the throne of England with the blot of a continual usurpation?





