They who affect to consider that part of us in any other light insult while they cajole us; they do not want us for counsellors in deliberation, but to list us as soldiers for battle.
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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There is such a thing as a natural representative of the people.
It cannot be concealed: we are a divided people.
We are dreadfully open to delusion and to dejection; but we are capable of being animated and undeceived.
But whatever may be represented concerning the meanness of the popular spirit, I, for one, do not think so desperately of the British nation.
Without this, no government, certainly not our government, is capable of a great war.
This war, in particular, cannot be carried on, unless they are enthusiastically in favor of it.
Without disputing (God forbid I should dispute!) the sole competence of the king and the Parliament, each in its province, to decide on war and peace, I venture to say no war can be long carried on against the will of the people.
If this be our deliberate mind, truly we deserve to lose, what it is impossible we should long retain, the name of a nation.
They are pleased to confide their property to the safeguard of those who are robbers by inclination, interest, habit, and system.
They are satisfied to seek in the clemency of practised murderers the security of their lives.
They are content to rest their religion on the piety of atheists by establishment.
They are willing to trust to the sympathy of regicides the guaranty of the British monarchy.
Then the people of England are contented to seek in the kindness of a foreign, systematic enemy, combined with a dangerous faction at home, a security which they cannot find in their own patriotism and their own courage.
But let their fears, or their hopes, or their desires, be what they will, they should recollect that they who would make peace without a previous knowledge of the terms make a surrender.
It seems, they act under the impression of terrors of another sort, which have frightened them out of their first apprehensions.
It is strange, but it may be true, that, as the danger from Jacobinism is increased in my eyes and in yours, the fear of it is lessened in the eyes of many people who formerly regarded it with horror.
A long habit of humiliation does not seem a very good preparative to manly and vigorous sentiment.
To diet a man into weakness and languor, afterwards to give him the greater strength, has more of the empiric than the rational physician.
We are called upon scandalously to betray the fundamental securities to ourselves and to all nations.
We must make a peace separately from our allies.
It is not difficult to discern what sort of humanity our government is to learn from these Siren singers.
If they do these things in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry?
I wish ministry would seriously consider the importance of their seeming to confirm the enemy in an opinion that his frequent use of appeals to the people against their government has not been without its effect.
If we proceed in this business, under this preliminary declaration, it seems to me that we admit, (now for the third time,) by something a great deal stronger than words, the truth of the charges of every kind which they make upon the…
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