It is, however, out of these, or of such as these, guilty and impenitent, despising the experience of others, and their own, that some people talk of choosing their negotiators with those Jacobins who they suppose may be recovered to a sounder mind.
Burke warns against the folly of negotiating with those who remain unrepentant for their past actions.
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I would not exclude alteration neither; but even when I changed, it should be to preserve.
If any of them should happen to propose a scheme of liberty soberly limited, and defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more splendidly popular.
They come from one who has been no tool of power, no flatterer of greatness, and who in his last acts does not wish to belie the tenor of his life.
But when the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service.
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