In my eye it is no more than the preference of a fiction over a chimera; but I blame the preference given to those fictitious private debts over the standing defence and the standing government.
Burke criticizes the preference given to fictitious debts over the essential needs of defense and governance.
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More from Edmund Burke
They threw a politic, well-wrought veil over every circumstance tending to weaken the rights which in the meliorated order of succession they meant to perpetuate, or which might furnish a precedent for any future departure from what they…
The ceremony of cashiering kings, of which these gentlemen talk so much at their ease, can rarely, if ever, be performed without force.
They have little regard to the obvious consequences of their doctrine, though they may see that it leaves positive authority in very few of the positive institutions of this country.
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?
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