With us are no retributory superstitions, by which a foundation of charity compensates, through ages, to the poor, for the rapine and injustice of a day.
Edmund Burke: “With us are no retributory superstitions, by which a foundation of charity compensates, through ages, to the poor, for…”
Editor's note · Context
Burke reflects on the absence of compensatory traditions in English society.
Share
More from Edmund Burke
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.
But an absurd theory on one side of a question forms no justification for alleging a false fact or promulgating mischievous maxims on the other.
No experience has taught us that in any other course or method than that of an hereditary crown our liberties can be regularly perpetuated and preserved sacred as our hereditary right.
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…





