Oppression makes wise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which is better than the sobriety of fools.
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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Should we not obtest Heaven, and whatever justice there is yet on earth?
What should we feel under this inhuman, insulting, and barbarous protection of Muscovites, Swedes, or Hollanders?
What would be our sentiments, if in that miserable service we were not to be considered either as English, or as Swedes, Dutch, Danes, but as outcasts of the human race?
What should I think of those potentates who insulted their suffering brethren,--who treated them as vagrants, or at least as mendicants,--and could find no allies, no friends, but in regicide murderers and robbers?
Could I in any way show myself more a patriot?
Should I consider myself as a traitor to my country, and deserving of death, if I knocked at the door and heart of every potentate in Christendom to succor my friends, and to avenge them on their enemies?
Would not all my duties and all my affections be there, and there only?
Would not the exiles of England alone be my government and my fellow-citizens?
Would this be the England that you and I, and even strangers, admired, honored, loved, and cherished?
In such a case, is it in the faction of robbers I am to look for my country?
Am I to transfer to the intruders, who, not content to turn you out naked to the world, would rob you of your very name, all the esteem and respect I owe to you?
Nation is a moral essence, not a geographical arrangement, or a denomination of the nomenclator.
To be at peace with robbery is to be an accomplice with it.
This pretended republic is founded in crimes, and exists by wrong and robbery; and wrong and robbery, far from a title to anything, is war with mankind.
It is a destruction and decomposition of the whole society; which never can be made of right by any faction, however powerful, nor without terrible consequences to all about it, both in the act and in the example.
The state, in its essence, must be moral and just: and it may be so, though a tyrant or usurper should be accidentally at the head of it.
They who massacre, plunder, and expel the body of the proprietary are murderers and robbers.
It is a question not between France and England; it is a question between property and force.
They who (though with the purest intentions) recognize the authority of these regicides and robbers upon principle justify their acts, and establish them as precedents.
It violates the rights upon which not only the community of France, but those on which all communities are founded.
The example of what is done by France is too important not to have a vast and extensive influence; and that example, backed with its power, must bear with great force on those who are near it, especially on those who shall recognize the…
In describing the nuisance erected by so pestilential a manufactory, by the construction of so infamous a brothel, by digging a night-cellar for such thieves, murderers, and house-breakers as never infested the world, I am so far from…
As suits in civil society, so war in the political, must ever be a matter of great deliberation.
But the exercise of that competent jurisdiction is a matter of moral prudence.
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