The state has dominion and conquest for its sole objects,--dominion over minds by proselytism, over bodies by arms.
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.
gutenberg.org
Individuality is left out of their scheme of government.
In that country, entirely to cut off a branch of commerce, to extinguish a manufacture, to destroy the circulation of money, to violate credit, to suspend the course of agriculture, even to burn a city or to lay waste a province of their…
The design is wicked, immoral, impious, oppressive: but it is spirited and daring; it is systematic; it is simple in its principle; it has unity and consistency in perfection.
France differs essentially from all those governments which are formed without system, which exist by habit, and which are confused with the multitude and with the complexity of their pursuits.
Fortunately, however, the great riches of this kingdom, arising from a variety of causes, and the disposition of the people, which is as great to spend as to accumulate, has easily afforded a disposable surplus that gives a mighty momentum…
Our legislature has been ever closely connected, in its most efficient part, with individual feeling and individual interest.
It aims at taking in the entire circle of human desires, and securing for them their fair enjoyment.
The British state is, without question, that which pursues the greatest variety of ends, and is the least disposed to sacrifice any one of them to another or to the whole.
That liberty was found, under monarchies styled absolute, in a degree unknown to the ancient commonwealths.
This comprehensive scheme virtually produced a degree of personal liberty in forms the most adverse to it.
In all these old countries, the state has been made to the people, and not the people conformed to the state.
The objects which they embrace are of the greatest possible variety, and have become in a manner infinite.
As their constitutions are not systematical, they have not been directed to any peculiar end, eminently distinguished, and superseding every other.
When I contemplate the scheme on which France is formed, and when I compare it with these systems with which it is and ever must be in conflict, those things which seem as defects in her polity are the very things which make me tremble.
This was the true secret of the commercial treaty, made, on their part, against all the old rules and principles of commerce, with a view of diverting the English nation, by a pursuit of immediate profit, from an attention to the progress…
As to Holland, they never forgave either the king or the ministry for suffering that object, which they justly looked on as principal in their design of reducing the power of England, to escape out of their hands.
From this their restless desire of an overruling influence, they bent a very great part of their designs and efforts to revive the old French party, which was a democratic party, in Holland, and to make a revolution there.
This added exceedingly to their hatred and contempt of their monarchy.
The different effects of a great military and ambitious republic and of a monarchy of the same description were constantly in their mouths.
What cure for the radical weakness of the French monarchy, to which all the means which wit could devise, or Nature and fortune could bestow, towards universal empire, was not of force to give life or vigor or consistency, but in a…
As to Prussia, a merely military power, they observed that one war had enriched her with as considerable a conquest as France had acquired in centuries.
The diplomatic politicians of whom I speak, and who formed by far the majority in that class, made disadvantageous comparisons even between their more legal and formalizing monarchy and the monarchies of other states, as a system of power…
From quarrelling with the court, they began to complain of monarchy itself, as a system of government too variable for any regular plan of national aggrandizement.
They soon found that they could not do without the philosophers; and the philosophers soon made them sensible that the destruction of religion was to supply them with means of conquest, first at home, and then abroad.
Politicians like Edmund Burke
