If any proposition can be clear in itself, it is this: that a law which shuts out from all secure and valuable property the bulk of the people cannot be made for the utility of the party so excluded.
Burke posits that laws excluding the majority from property cannot serve the public good, highlighting a fundamental flaw in such legislation.
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More from Edmund Burke
It is an evil inevitably attendant on the dominion of sovereign democratic republics.
They rob only to enable them to cheat; but in a very short time they defeat the ends both of the robbery and the fraud, by making out accounts for other purposes, which blow up their whole apparatus of force and of deception.
It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
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