If they mean honestly, why do they not strengthen the arms of honest men to support their ancient, legal, wise, and free government, given to them in the spring of 1788, against the inventions of craft and the theories of ignorance and folly?
Edmund Burke: “If they mean honestly, why do they not strengthen the arms of honest men to support their ancient, legal, wise, and free…”
Editor's note · Context
Burke questions the sincerity of those who do not support the established government against deceitful innovations.
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More from Edmund Burke
Who could doubt but that, at any expense to the state, of which they understood nothing, they must pursue their private interests, which they understood but too well?
The people of England will not ape the fashions they have never tried, nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial.
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.
Their trust for the future preservation of the Constitution was not in future revolutions.





