I do not affect to be frightened with this proposition, as if some hideous spectre had started from hell, which was to be sent back again by every form of exorcism and every kind of incantation.
Burke dismisses the fear surrounding a certain proposition, comparing it to a terrifying specter.
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More from Edmund Burke
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…
Their trust for the future preservation of the Constitution was not in future revolutions.
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.
Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity.
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