The ostracism could not very long save itself, and much less the state which it was meant to guard, from the attempts of ambition,--one of the natural, inbred, incurable distempers of a powerful democracy.
Burke warns that attempts to guard against ambition in a democracy are ultimately doomed to fail.
Share
More from Edmund Burke
Ill would our ancestors at the Revolution have deserved their fame for wisdom, if they had found no security for their freedom, but in rendering their government feeble in its operations and precarious in its tenure,--if they had been able…
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.
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?
The people of England will not ape the fashions they have never tried, nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial.
Other voices in this conversation
