We and our electors have their powers and privileges both made and circumscribed by prescription, as much to the full as the other parts; and as such we have always claimed them, and on no other title.
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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The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment, is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species, it almost always acts right.
Because a nation is not an idea only of local extent and individual momentary aggregation, but it is an idea of continuity which extends in time as well as in numbers and in space.
It is a better presumption even of the choice of a nation,--far better than any sudden and temporary arrangement by actual election.
It is a presumption in favor of any settled scheme of government against any untried project, that a nation has long existed and flourished under it.
Prescription is the most solid of all titles, not only to property, but, which is to secure that property, to government.
How came they neither to have the choice of kings, or lords, or judges, or generals, or admirals, or bishops, or priests, or ministers, or justices of peace?
Give them all they ask, and your grant is still a cheat: for how comes only a third to be their younger-children's fortune in this settlement?
What sort of treaty of partition is this for those who have an inherent right to the whole?
What! one third only of the legislature, and of the government no share at all?
When you come to examine into this claim of right, founded on the right of self-government in each individual, you find the thing demanded infinitely short of the principle of the demand.
The House of Commons, in that light, undoubtedly, is no representative of the people, as a collection of individuals.
They, therefore, who reject the principle of natural and personal representation are essentially and eternally at variance with those who claim it.
As to the claim of right, the meanest petitioner, the most gross and ignorant, is as good as the best: in some respects his claim is more favorable, on account of his ignorance; his weakness, his poverty, and distress only add to his…
As all government stands upon opinion, they know that the way utterly to destroy it is to remove that opinion, to take away all reverence, all confidence from it; and then, at the first blast of public discontent and popular tumult, it…
It is singular that they report nothing against the crown, nothing against the lords: but in the House of Commons everything is unsound; it is ruinous in every part; it is infested by the dry rot, and ready to tumble about our ears without…
Our political architects have taken a survey of the fabric of the British Constitution.
I do not affect to be frightened with this proposition, as if some hideous spectre had started from hell, which was to be sent back again by every form of exorcism and every kind of incantation.
Whoever would contrive to render the life of man much shorter than it is would, I am satisfied, find the surest receipt for increasing the wickedness of our nature.
The moments of profits are precious; never are men so wicked as during a general mortality.
They rush violently and precipitately on their object; they lose all regard to decorum.
The shortness of time in which they are to reap the profits of iniquity is far from checking the avidity of corrupt men; it renders them infinitely more ravenous.
A triennial was near ruining, a septennial Parliament saved your Constitution; nor, perhaps, have you ever known a more flourishing period, for the union of national prosperity, dignity, and liberty, than the sixty years you have passed…
The distemper of this age is a poverty of spirit and of genius: it is trifling, it is futile, worse than ignorant, superficially taught, with the politics and morals of girls at a boarding-school rather than of men and statesmen: but it is…
I wish it were true; but it is not: here again we have experience, and experience is against us.
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