It is a dreadful truth, but it is a truth that cannot be concealed: in ability, in dexterity, in the distinctness of their views, the Jacobins are our superiors.
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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It did not appear to them that virtue and heroism ought to be purchased by millions of rix-dollars.
As long as these powers flattered themselves that the menace of force would produce the effect of force, they acted on those declarations; but when their menaces failed of success, their efforts took a new direction.
The true nature of a Jacobin war, in the beginning, was by most of the Christian powers felt, acknowledged, and even in the most precise manner declared.
It will be a folly scarcely deserving of pity, and too mischievous for contempt, to think of restraining it in any other country whilst it is predominant there.
In France is the bank of deposit and the bank of circulation of all the pernicious principles that are forming in every state.
Everywhere else the faction is militant; in France it is triumphant.
The social order which restrains it feeds it.
Its spirit lies deep in the corruptions of our common nature.
In its sleep it recruits its strength and prepares its exertion.
Where it least appears in action, it is still full of life.
As I understood the matter, we were at war, not with its conduct, but with its existence,--convinced that its existence and its hostility were the same.
I never thought we could make peace with the system; because it was not for the sake of an object we pursued in rivalry with each other, but with the system itself that we were at war.
I conceived that the contest, once begun, could not be laid down again, to be resumed at our discretion, but that our first struggle with this evil would also be our last.
A sure destruction impends over those infatuated princes who, in the conflict with this new and unheard-of power, proceed as if they were engaged in a war that bore a resemblance to their former contests, or that they can make peace in the…
It is that spirit which inspires into them a new, a pernicious, a desolating activity.
That faction is the evil spirit that possesses the body of France,--that informs it as a soul,--that stamps upon its ambition, and upon all its pursuits, a characteristic mark, which strongly distinguishes them from the same general…
It is the faction that makes them truly dreadful.
My ideas and my principles led me, in this contest, to encounter France, not as a state, but as a faction.
On that ground, I must therefore again recall your mind to our original opinions, which time and events have not taught me to vary.
But in converting this intrigue into a mission for peace, the English ministry joined to the hope of giving a new enemy to France that of justifying the continuance of the war in the eyes of the English nation, and of throwing all the…
While these dispositions shall be persisted in, nothing is left for the king but to prosecute a war equally just and necessary.
Reason and authority do not move in the same parallel.
But to exert reason is not to revolt against authority.
When I seem not to acquiesce in the acts of those I respect in every degree short of superstition, I am obliged to give my reasons fully.
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