As to the inhabitants, they are a nest of Jacobins, which is delivered into our hands, not from principle, but from fear.
Edmund Burke: “As to the inhabitants, they are a nest of Jacobins, which is delivered into our hands, not from principle, but from…”
Editor's note · Context
Burke characterizes the inhabitants of Toulon as motivated by fear rather than ideological commitment.
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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…
As he is not to obey us, but we are to obey the law in him, our Constitution has made no sort of provision towards rendering him, as a servant, in any degree responsible.
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.
But an absurd theory on one side of a question forms no justification for alleging a false fact or promulgating mischievous maxims on the other.





