The assurance of a stable peace, grounded on the stability of their system, proceeds on this hypothesis,--that their hostility to other nations has proceeded from their anarchy at home, and from the prevalence of a populace which their government had not strength enough to master.
Burke analyzes the relationship between internal stability and external hostility in governance.
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More from Edmund Burke
We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which Nature teaches us to revere individual men: on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended.
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.
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.
But supposing they had ranked as they ought to do, and as with us they do actually, the sides of sick-beds are not the academies for forming statesmen and legislators.
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