There is a plot to bring in a foreign power to destroy the Church.
Edmund Burke
The Public Record
Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician who is widely credited as the founder of the cultural and political philosophy of conservatism. Regarded as one of the most influential conservative thinkers and political writers of the 18th century, Burke spent the majority of his career in Great Britain and was elected as a member of Parliament (MP) from 1766 to 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. His writings played a significant role in influencing public views and opinions in both Great Britain and France following the French Revolution in 1789, and he remains a major figure in modern conservative circles.
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This is necessary in all government; and if opinion be support, what takes away this destroys that support: but the liberty of the press is necessary to this government.
The good fame of government is the same; it ought not to be traduced.
The law forbids you to revenge; when it ties up the hands of some, it ought to restrain the tongues of others.
Good fame is an outwork that defends them all and renders them all valuable.
Undoubtedly the good fame of every man ought to be under the protection of the laws, as well as his life and liberty and property.
The spirit of the Star-Chamber has transmigrated and lived again; and Westminster Hall was obliged to borrow from the Star-Chamber, for the same reasons as the Star-Chamber had borrowed from the Roman Forum, because they had no law…
Libelling is not the crime of an illiterate people.
Certainly they are most unfavorable, indeed totally adverse, to the Constitution of this country.
It is the very ancient privilege of the people of England, that they shall be tried, except in the known exceptions, not by judges appointed by the crown, but by their own fellow-subjects, the peers of that county court at which they owe…
We stand in a situation very honorable to ourselves and very useful to our country, if we do not abuse or abandon the trust that is placed in us.
On the contrary, I will drive away such pretenders; I will nurse its venerable age, and with lenient arts extend a parent's breath.
I look with filial reverence on the Constitution of my country, and never will cut it in pieces, and put it into the kettle of any magician, in order to boil it, with the puddle of their compounds, into youth and vigor.
It is for fear of losing the inestimable treasure we have that I do not venture to game it out of my hands for the vain hope of improving it.
It is to this humor, and it is to the measures growing out of it, that I set myself (I hope not alone) in the most determined opposition.
It is despised and rejected of men, and every device and invention of ingenuity or idleness set up in opposition or in preference to it.
Now all its excellencies are forgot, its faults are now forcibly dragged into day, exaggerated by every artifice of representation.
By it they lived, for it they were ready to die.
This Constitution in former days used to be the admiration and the envy of the world: it was the pattern for politicians, the theme of the eloquent, the meditation of the philosopher, in every part of the world.
Our first, our dearest, most comprehensive relation, our country, is gone.
No man has ever willingly obeyed, much less was desirous of defending with his blood, a mischievous and absurd scheme of government.
The first may be cured in the individual by the motives of religion, virtue, honor, fear, shame, or interest.
There is a difference between a moral or political exposure of a public evil relative to the administration of government, whether in men or systems, and a declaration of defects, real or supposed, in the fundamental constitution of your…
My right honorable friend, in supporting this motion, disgraces his friends and justifies his enemies in order to blacken the Constitution of his country, even of that House of Commons which supported him.
For to discredit the only government which he either possesses or can project, what is this but to destroy all government? and this is anarchy.
Politicians like Edmund Burke
