I recommend it to your Lordships' reading,--when you will find, that, so far from the magistrate having any power either to imprison arbitrarily or to fine arbitrarily, the rules of fines are laid down with ten thousand times more exactness than with us.
Burke encourages his audience to read the book that outlines the precise legal rules governing magistrates.
Share
More from Edmund Burke
Let us add, if we please, but let us preserve what they have left; and standing on the firm ground of the British Constitution, let us be satisfied to admire, rather than attempt to follow in their desperate flights, the aëronauts of…
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.
Whatever they are, I wish my countrymen rather to recommend to our neighbors the example of the British Constitution than to take models from them for the improvement of our own.
I think our happy situation owing to our Constitution,--but owing to the whole of it, and not to any part singly,--owing in a great measure to what we have left standing in our several reviews and reformations, as well as to what we have…
Other voices in this conversation
