I now find that in its effects it is to be the greatest of all blessings.
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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I confess I was always blind enough to regard the French Revolution, in the act, and much more in the example, as one of the greatest calamities that had ever fallen upon mankind.
It costs him nothing to excite terror, because he lays it at his pleasure.
It is curious that they all come from the inexhaustible drug-shop of the Regicide dispensary.
To a free people this would be a matter of alarm; but this physician of October has in his shop all sorts of salves for all sorts of sores.
These Regicides considered a Regicide peace as a cure for all their evils; and so far as I can find, they showed nothing at all of the timidity which the noble lord apprehends in what they call the just cause of liberty.
But they who prophesy pleasant things get great present applause; and in days of calamity people have something else to think of: they lose, in their feeling of their distress, all memory of those who flattered them in their prosperity.
Instead of trembling for the existence of our government from the spirit of licentiousness and anarchy, the author would make us believe we are to tremble for our liberties from the great accession of power which is to accrue to government.
Its malignity towards humankind will subsist with undiminished heat, whilst the means of giving it effect must proceed, and every means of resisting it must inevitably and rapidly decline.
Has this empire nothing to alarm you when all struggle against it is over, when mankind shall be silent before it, when all nations shall be disarmed, disheartened, and truly divided by a treacherous peace?
Tell me, my friend, do its terrors appall you into an abject submission, or rouse you to a vigorous defence?
Talk not to me of what swarm of republics may come from this carcass!
But as to any practice to ensue, are we not yet cured of the malady of speculating on the circumstances of things totally different from those in which we live and move?
Speculate on, good my Lord! provided you ground no part of your politics on such unsteady speculations.
So disposed is this author to peace, that, having laid a comfortable foundation for our security in the greatness of her empire, he has another in reserve, if that should fail, upon quite a contrary ground: that is, a speculation of her…
I trust I shall hardly be told, in palliation of this shameful system of politics, that the author expresses his sentiments only as doubts.
If I had but one hour to live, I would employ it in decrying this wretched system, and die with my pen in my hand to mark out the dreadful consequences of receiving an arrangement of empire dictated by the despotism of Regicide to my own…
They have but one fault,--that they are directly contrary to the common sense and common feeling of mankind.
But this empire is to be her ruin, and to take away all alarm and jealousy on the part of England, and to destroy her preponderance over the miserable remains of Europe.
What an escape we have had, that we and our allies were not the conquerors!
These conquests eventually will be the cause of her destruction." So that they who hate the cause of usurpation, and dread the power of France under any form, are to wish her to be a conqueror, in order to accelerate her ruin.
No fewer than ten sovereign princes had, some the whole, all a very considerable part of their dominions under the yoke of that dreadful faction.
When I hear the master and reason on one side, and the servant and his single and unsupported assertion on the other, my part is taken.
This is Jacobinism sublimed and exalted into most pure and perfect essence.
The October speculator is of opinion that monarchy is of so poisonous a quality that a moderate territorial power is far more dangerous to its neighbors under that abominable regimen than the greatest empire in the hands of a republic.
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