The moment men cease to augment the common stock, the moment they no longer enrich it by their industry or their self-denial, their luxury and even their ease are obliged to pay contribution to the public; not because they are vicious principles, but because they are unproductive.
Burke asserts that unproductive luxury must contribute to public finances when individuals stop enriching the common stock.
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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.
Who could doubt but that, at any expense to the state, of which they understood nothing, they must pursue their private interests, which they understood but too well?
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
Who could conceive that men who are habitually meddling, daring, subtle, active, of litigious dispositions and unquiet minds, would easily fall back into their old condition of obscure contention, and laborious, low, and unprofitable…
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