For, as we grow enlightened, the public will not bear, for any length of time, to pay for the maintenance of whole armies of prisoners, nor, at their own expense, submit to keep jails as a sort of garrisons, merely to fortify the absurd principle of making men judges in their own cause.
Burke predicts that as society becomes more enlightened, the public will reject the burden of maintaining prisoners under unjust laws.
Share
More from Edmund Burke
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
This is the spirit of our Constitution, not only in its settled course, but in all its revolutions.
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.
Governments must be abused and deranged indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past.
Other voices in this conversation
