Edmund Burke: “No peer has condescended to superintend with more vigilance the declining franchises of the poor commons.”

The prattling about the rights of men will not be accepted in payment of a biscuit or a pound of gunpowder.

They will become flatterers instead of legislators,--the instruments, not the guides of the people.

It is an evil inevitably attendant on the dominion of sovereign democratic republics.

But when the Assembly were led, through a contempt of moral, to a defiance of economical principles, it might at least have been expected that nothing would be omitted on their part to lessen this difficulty, to prevent any aggravation of…