This same wealth, which is at all times treason and lèze-nation to indigent and rapacious despotism, under all modes of polity, was your temptation to violate property, law, and religion, united in one object.
Burke asserts that the wealth of institutions became a primary motive for the French revolutionaries to infringe upon property, law, and religion.
Share
More from Edmund Burke
They will become flatterers instead of legislators,--the instruments, not the guides of the people.
They come from one who has been no tool of power, no flatterer of greatness, and who in his last acts does not wish to belie the tenor of his life.
Let us imitate their caution, if we wish to deserve their fortune or to retain their bequests.
I would not exclude alteration neither; but even when I changed, it should be to preserve.
Other voices in this conversation
