If none but meritorious service or real talent were to be rewarded, this nation has not wanted, and this nation will not want, the means of rewarding all the service it ever will receive, and encouraging all the merit it ever will produce.
Burke expresses confidence in the nation's ability to reward true merit and talent.
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More from Edmund Burke
To tell the people that they are relieved by the dilapidation of their public estate is a cruel and insolent imposition.
Never did a state, in any case, enrich itself by the confiscations of the citizens.
It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
It is an evil inevitably attendant on the dominion of sovereign democratic republics.
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