When men, therefore, break up the original compact or agreement which gives its corporate form and capacity to a state, they are no longer a people,--they have no longer a corporate existence,--they have no longer a legal coactive force to bind within, nor a claim to be recognized abroad.
Burke argues that breaking the original social compact results in the loss of a collective identity.
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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.
The prattling about the rights of men will not be accepted in payment of a biscuit or a pound of gunpowder.
Rome, under her emperors, united the evils of both systems; and this unnatural combination was one great cause of her ruin.
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