Improving upon the preceding transaction, improving on it by a kind of refinement in corruption, he drives away the lawful mother from her lawful guardianship; the mother of nature he turns out, and he delivers her son to the stepmother to be the guardian of his person.
Edmund Burke: “Improving upon the preceding transaction, improving on it by a kind of refinement in corruption, he drives away the…”
Editor's note · Context
Burke describes the manipulation of family dynamics for corrupt purposes, emphasizing the moral decay in governance.
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The ceremony of cashiering kings, of which these gentlemen talk so much at their ease, can rarely, if ever, be performed without force.
As he is not to obey us, but we are to obey the law in him, our Constitution has made no sort of provision towards rendering him, as a servant, in any degree responsible.
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.
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.





