If we look to nothing but our domestic condition, the state of the nation is full even to plethora; but if we imagine that this country can long maintain its blood and its food as disjoined from the community of mankind, such an opinion does not deserve refutation as absurd, but pity as insane.
Burke critiques the notion that a nation can isolate itself from the global community, deeming such an idea not just absurd but pitiable.
Share
More from Edmund Burke
All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for…
When such an unwarrantable maxim is once established, that no throne is lawful but the elective, no one act of the princes who preceded this era of fictitious election can be valid.
But the course of succession is the healthy habit of the British Constitution.
Who could flatter himself that these men, suddenly, and as it were by enchantment, snatched from the humblest rank of subordination, would not be intoxicated with their unprepared greatness?
Other voices in this conversation
