We have shown you, that, if these parties are to be compared together, it is not the rights of the people which are nothing, but rather the rights of the sovereign which are so.
Edmund Burke: “We have shown you, that, if these parties are to be compared together, it is not the rights of the people which are…”
Editor's note · Context
Burke argues that the rights of the people are paramount, countering the notion that the sovereign's rights are absolute.
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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.
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.
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.
They look on the frame of their commonwealth, such as it stands, to be of inestimable value; and they conceive the undisturbed succession of the crown to be a pledge of the stability and perpetuity of all the other members of our…





