If we once can admit, for a single instant, in a Governor-General, a principle, however defended, upon any pretence whatever, to receive bribes in consequence of his office, there is an end of all virtue, an end of the laws, and no hope left in the supreme justice of the country.
Burke warns that allowing bribery in governance destroys virtue and justice.
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More from Edmund Burke
If all the absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they are conversant, we should have no law and no religion left in the world.
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
But the king of Great Britain obeys no other person; all other persons are individually, and collectively too, under him, and owe to him a legal obedience.
We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which Nature teaches us to revere individual men: on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended.
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