God forbid that the history of this or any country should give such encouragement to the folly or vices of those who govern!
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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These records will be far from giving the least countenance to a doctrine so repugnant to humanity and good sense as that the security of any establishment, civil or religious, can ever depend upon the misery of those who live under it, or…
For they even now show to those who have been at the pains to examine them, and they may show one day to all the world, that these rebellions were not produced by toleration, but by persecution,--that they arose not from just and mild…
But there is an interior history of Ireland, the genuine voice of its records and monuments, which speaks a very different language from these histories, from Temple and from Clarendon: these restore Nature to its just rights, and policy…
Indulgence only made them arrogant, and power daring; confidence only excited and enabled them to exert their inherent treachery; and the times which they generally selected for their most wicked and desperate rebellions were those in…
The great prop of this whole system is not pretended to be its justice or its utility, but the supposed danger to the state, which gave rise to it originally, and which, they apprehend, would return, if this system were overturned.
By these means, what beautiful and useful spots have there not been made about trading and manufacturing towns, and how has agriculture had reason to bless that happy alliance with commerce! and how miserable must that nation be, whose…
This denial of landed property to the gross of the people has this further evil effect in preventing the improvement of land, that it prevents any of the property acquired in trade to be regorged, as it were, upon the land.
This circumstance shows how miserably and peculiarly impolitic it has been in Ireland to tie down the body of the tenantry to short and unprofitable tenures.
But we have an additional argument to demonstrate the ill policy of denying the occupiers of land any solid property in it.
This is a regulation extremely worthy of our attention, as it is not a consequential, but a direct discouragement to melioration,--as directly as if the law had said in express terms, "Thou shalt not improve.
But it is not enough that industry is checked by the confinement of its views; it is further discouraged by the limitation of its own direct object, profit.
Confine a man to momentary possession, and you at once cut off that laudable avarice which every wise state has cherished as one of the first principles of its greatness.
For a law against property is a law against industry,--the latter having always the former, and nothing else, for its object.
Every law which obstructs it in any part of this distribution is, in proportion to the force and extent of the obstruction, a discouragement to industry.
Those civil constitutions which promote industry are such as facilitate the acquisition, secure the holding, enable the fixing, and suffer the alienation of property.
To begin with the first great instrument of national happiness and strength, its industry: I must observe, that, although these penal laws do, indeed, inflict many hardships on those who are obnoxious to them, yet their chief, their most…
If we show that these penal laws of Ireland destroy not one only, but every one, of these materials of public prosperity, it will not be difficult to perceive that Great Britain, whilst they subsist, never can draw from that country all…
The stock of materials by which any nation is rendered flourishing and prosperous are its industry, its knowledge or skill, its morals, its execution of justice, its courage, and the national union in directing these powers to one point…
In the foregoing book we considered these laws in a very simple point of view, and in a very general one,--merely as a system of hardship imposed on the body of the community; and from thence, and from some other arguments, inferred the…
What is true of a robber is true of a rebel; and what is true of one robber or rebel is as true, and it is a much more important truth, of one hundred thousand.
This would be a doctrine made to perpetuate and exasperate war; and on that principle it directly impugns the law of nations, which is built upon this principle, that war should be softened as much as possible, and that it should cease as…
It will be admitted also, that their power may be so great as to make it very prudent to treat with them, in order to save effusion of blood, perhaps to save the nation.
Observe what monstrous consequences would result from a contrary position.
But its own contracts are not subject to it: it is subject to them; and the compact of the king acting constitutionally was the compact of the nation.
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