This is a revenue which is to be torn away by the action of any person,--a revenue which they must return back to the person complaining, as they in justice ought to do: for no nation ever avowed making a revenue out of bribery and peculation.
Burke argues against the legitimacy of generating revenue from bribery, emphasizing the moral obligation to return such funds to the victims.
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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.
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
Who could conceive that men who are habitually meddling, daring, subtle, active, of litigious dispositions and unquiet minds, would easily fall back into their old condition of obscure contention, and laborious, low, and unprofitable…
Ill would our ancestors at the Revolution have deserved their fame for wisdom, if they had found no security for their freedom, but in rendering their government feeble in its operations and precarious in its tenure,--if they had been able …
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