He is an accuser preferring a charge and receiving apologies, without giving the party an answer, although he had a crowd of secretaries about him, maintained at the expense of the miserable people of Benares, and paid by sums of money drawn fraudulently from their pockets.
Burke condemns the behavior of an accuser who ignores the rights of the accused while maintaining a facade of authority.
Share
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.
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.
They look upon the legal hereditary succession of their crown as among their rights, not as among their wrongs,--as a benefit, not as a grievance,--as a security for their liberty, not as a badge of servitude.
They look on the frame of their commonwealth, such as it stands, to be of inestimable value; and they conceive the undisturbed succession of the crown to be a pledge of the stability and perpetuity of all the other members of our…
Other voices in this conversation
