Nothing can so completely ruin any of the old governments, ours in particular, as the acknowledgment, directly or by implication, of any kind of superiority in this new power.
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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To us it is a Colossus which bestrides our Channel.
We are at war with a system which by its essence is inimical to all other governments, and which makes peace or war as peace and war may best contribute to their subversion.
If none will undertake to lead us right, we shall find guides who will contrive to conduct us to shame and ruin.
Is it that the people are changed, that the commonwealth cannot be protected by its laws?
Our most salutary and most beautiful institutions yield nothing but dust and smut; the harvest of our law is no more than stubble.
In proportion as we are attracted towards the focus of illegality, irreligion, and desperate enterprise, all the venomous and blighting insects of the state are awakened into life.
They who bow to the enemy abroad will not be of power to subdue the conspirator at home.
How comes it that in all the state prosecutions of magnitude, from the Revolution to within these two or three years, the crown has scarcely ever retired disgraced and defeated from its courts?
Living law, full of reason, and of equity and justice, (as it is, or it should not exist,) ought to be severe, and awful too,--or the words of menace, whether written on the parchment roll of England or cut into the brazen tablet of Borne…
Dead and putrid, it is insufficient to save the state, but potent to infect and to kill.
Everything is secure, except what the laws have made sacred; everything is tameness and languor that is not fury and faction.
Public prosecutions are become little better than schools for treason,--of no use but to improve the dexterity of criminals in the mystery of evasion, or to show with what complete impunity men may conspire against the commonwealth, with…
Far from desiring to conceal or even to palliate the evil in the representation, I wish to lay it down as my foundation, that never greater existed.
The discomfitures which the Republic of Assassins has suffered have uniformly called forth new exertions, which not only repaired old losses, but prepared new conquests.
Hence it was that all their early victories have been followed almost immediately with the usual effects of a defeat, whilst all the advantages obtained by the Regicides have been followed by the consequences that were natural.
This great, prolific error (I mean that peace was always in our power) has been the cause that rendered the Allies indifferent about the direction of the war, and persuaded them that they might always risk a choice and even a change in its…
Its hostile amity can be obtained on no terms that do not imply an inability hereafter to resist its designs.
They could not, or rather they would not, read, in the most unequivocal declarations of the enemy, and in his uniform conduct, that more safety was to be found in the most arduous war than in the friendship of that kind of being.
People imagined that their ceasing to resist was the sure way to be secure.
The Allies, and Great Britain amongst the rest, (and perhaps amongst the foremost,) have been miserably deluded by this great, fundamental error: that it was in our power to make peace with this monster of a state, whenever we chose to…
The independent advantages obtained by us at the beginning of the war, and which were made at the expense of that common cause, if they deceive us about our largest and our surest interest, are to be reckoned amongst our heaviest losses.
Our account of the war, as a war of communion, to the very point in which we began to throw out lures, oglings, and glances for peace, was a war of disaster, and of little else.
We may consider it as a sure axiom, that, as, on the one hand, no confederacy of the least effect or duration can exist against France, of which England is not only a part, but the head, so neither can England pretend to cope with France…
We have not in the slightest degree impaired the strength of the common enemy in any one of those points in which his particular force consists,--at the same time that new enemies to ourselves, new allies to the Regicide Republic, have…
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