The whole, indeed, of their scheme of revenue is to make, by any artifice, an appearance of a full reservoir for the hour, whilst at the same time they cut off the springs and living fountains of perennial supply.
Burke criticizes the French revolutionaries' financial strategy as short-sighted, focused on temporary appearances of wealth while destroying the sources of lasting prosperity.
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More from Edmund Burke
If all the absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they are conversant, we should have no law and no religion left in the world.
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.
Though a king may abdicate for his own person, he cannot abdicate for the monarchy.
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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