This fanatical atheism left out, we omit the principal feature in the French Revolution, and a principal consideration with regard to the effects to be expected from a peace with it.
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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Nothing, indeed, but the possession of some power can with any certainty discover what at the bottom is the true character of any man.
Not being able to revenge themselves on God, they have a delight in vicariously defacing, degrading, torturing, and tearing in pieces His image in man.
They cannot strike the sun out of heaven, but they are able to raise a smouldering smoke that obscures him from their own eyes.
Religion is among the most powerful causes of enthusiasm.
The whole man moves under the discipline of his opinions.
The social nature of man impels him to propagate his principles, as much as physical impulses urge him to propagate his kind.
But there is no doctrine whatever, on which men can warm, that is not capable of the very same effect.
They who have made but superficial studies in the natural history of the human mind have been taught to look on religious opinions as the only cause of enthusiastic zeal and sectarian propagation.
They had rather domineer in a parish of atheists than rule over a Christian world.
The philosophers had one predominant object, which they pursued with a fanatical fury,--that is, the utter extirpation of religion.
In the Revolution of France, two sorts of men were principally concerned in giving a character and determination to its pursuits: the philosophers and the politicians.
The Revolution was made, not to make France free, but to make her formidable,--not to make her a neighbor, but a mistress,--not to make her more observant of laws, but to put her in a condition to impose them.
The changes made by that Revolution were not the better to accommodate her to the old and usual relations, but to produce new ones.
The Revolution in France had the relation of France to other nations as one of its principal objects.
I am perfectly astonished at the boldness of character, at the intrepidity of mind, the firmness of nerve, in those who are able with deliberation to face the perils of Jacobin fraternity.
We are apt to speak of a low and pusillanimous spirit as the ordinary cause by which dubious wars terminate in humiliating treaties.
No disaster of war, no calamity of season, could ever strike me with half the horror which I felt from what is introduced to us by this junction of parties under the soothing name of peace.
It does not require much sagacity to discern that no power wholly baffled and defeated in Europe can flatter itself with conquests in the West Indies.
I should be glad to see our suppliant negotiator in the act of putting his feather to the ear of the Directory, to make it unclench the fist, and, by his tickling, to charm that rich prize out of the iron gripe of robbery and ambition!
By this measure the balance of power in the West Indies is totally destroyed.
It was delivered into the hands of the barbarians, without, as I can find, any public reclamation on our part, not only in contravention to one of the fundamental treaties that compose the public law of Europe, but in defiance of the…
The island of Hispaniola (of which we have but one poor corner, by a slippery hold) is perhaps equal to England in extent, and in fertility is far superior.
The noblest island within the tropics, worth all that we possess put together, is by the vassal Spaniard delivered into her hands.
Having abandoned this obvious policy connected with principle, we have seen the Regicide power taking the reverse course, and making real conquests in the West Indies, to which all our dear-bought advantages (if we could hold them) are…
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