It is known, I believe, that the greater as well as the sounder part of our excluded countrymen have not adopted the wild ideas and wilder engagements which have been held out to them, but have rather chosen to hope small and safe concessions from the legal power than boundless objects from trouble and confusion.
Burke argues for cautious optimism among excluded groups rather than embracing radical ideas.
Share
More from Edmund Burke
This is the result of all the delusions held out to engage a miserable people in rebellion, murder, and sacrilege, and to make them prompt and zealous instruments in the ruin of their country!
Never did a state, in any case, enrich itself by the confiscations of the citizens.
It is an evil inevitably attendant on the dominion of sovereign democratic republics.
Other voices in this conversation
