The provincials flocked in; even slaves were no sooner enfranchised than they were advanced to the highest posts; and the plan of comprehension, which had overturned the republic, strengthened the monarchy.
Burke discusses the consequences of enfranchisement in the Roman Empire, where even former slaves could rise to power, reflecting on the dynamics of social mobility.
Share
More from Edmund Burke
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.
Governments must be abused and deranged indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past.
The House of Lords, for instance, is not morally competent to dissolve the House of Commons,--no, nor even to dissolve itself, nor to abdicate, if it would, its portion in the legislature of the kingdom.
They threw a politic, well-wrought veil over every circumstance tending to weaken the rights which in the meliorated order of succession they meant to perpetuate, or which might furnish a precedent for any future departure from what they…
Other voices in this conversation
