Edmund Burke: “It is their interest, because a temperate reform is permanent, and because it has a principle of growth.”

A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.

Their objects would be enlarged with their elevation; but their disposition, and habits, and mode of accomplishing their designs must remain the same.

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?

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…