What seemed to us to be the best system of liberty that a nation ever enjoyed to them seems the yoke of an intolerable slavery.
Edmund Burke: “What seemed to us to be the best system of liberty that a nation ever enjoyed to them seems the yoke of an intolerable…”
Editor's note · Context
Burke highlights the contrasting perceptions of liberty and slavery between England and revolutionary France.
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A few years ago I should be ashamed to overload a matter so capable of supporting itself by the then unnecessary support of any argument; but this seditious, unconstitutional doctrine is now publicly taught, avowed, and printed.
Ill would our ancestors at the Revolution have deserved their fame for wisdom, if they had found no security for their freedom, but in rendering their government feeble in its operations and precarious in its tenure,--if they had been able…
Who could doubt but that, at any expense to the state, of which they understood nothing, they must pursue their private interests, which they understood but too well?
If kings who did not owe their crown to the choice of their people had no title to make laws, what will become of the statute De tallagio non concedendo? of the Petition of Right? of the act of Habeas Corpus?





