Edmund Burke: “Experience, upon other data than those, is of all things the most delusive.”

Rome, under her emperors, united the evils of both systems; and this unnatural combination was one great cause of her ruin.

If any of them should happen to propose a scheme of liberty soberly limited, and defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more splendidly popular.

It is an evil inevitably attendant on the dominion of sovereign democratic republics.

But when the Assembly were led, through a contempt of moral, to a defiance of economical principles, it might at least have been expected that nothing would be omitted on their part to lessen this difficulty, to prevent any aggravation of…