Edmund Burke: “Everything in justice that is vile and odious is thrown upon him.”

Never did a state, in any case, enrich itself by the confiscations of the citizens.

To tell the people that they are relieved by the dilapidation of their public estate is a cruel and insolent imposition.

They come from one who has been no tool of power, no flatterer of greatness, and who in his last acts does not wish to belie the tenor of his life.

Who but the most desperate adventurers in philosophy and finance could at all have thought of destroying the settled revenue of the state, the sole security for the public credit, in the hope of rebuilding it with the materials of…