They judge of every man's capacity for office by the offices he has filled; and the more offices, the more ability.
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.
gutenberg.org
With them every man created a peer is first an hero ready-made.
They seek no further for merit than the preamble of a patent or the inscription on a tomb.
These gentle historians, on the contrary, dip their pens in nothing but the milk of human kindness.
These historians, recorders, and blazoners of virtues and arms differ wholly from that other description of historians who never assign any act of politicians to a good motive.
I would willingly leave him to the Herald's College, which the philosophy of the sans-culottes (prouder by far than all the Garters, and Norroys, and Clarencieux, and Rouge-Dragons that ever pranced in a procession of what his friends call…
Why will his Grace, by attacking me, force me reluctantly to compare my little merit with that which obtained from the crown those prodigies of profuse donation by which he tramples on the mediocrity of humble and laborious individuals?
I am a young man with very old pensions; he is an old man with very young pensions: that's all.
It is his ancestor, the original pensioner, that has laid up this inexhaustible fund of merit which makes his Grace so very delicate and exceptious about the merit of all other grantees of the crown.
My merits, whatever they are, are original and personal: his are derivative.
It would not be gross adulation, but uncivil irony, to say that he has any public merit of his own to keep alive the idea of the services by which his vast landed pensions were obtained.
But as to public service, why, truly, it would not be more ridiculous for me to compare myself, in rank, in fortune, in splendid descent, in youth, strength, or figure, with the Duke of Bedford, than to make a parallel between his services…
I really am at a loss to draw any sort of parallel between the public merits of his Grace, by which he justifies the grants he holds, and these services of mine, on the favorable construction of which I have obtained what his Grace so much…
Is it for him to question the dispensation of the royal favor?
The grants to the House of Russell were so enormous as not only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibility.
What I say about either of us is nothing more than a vehicle, as you, my Lord, will easily perceive, to convey my sentiments on matters far more worthy of your attention.
The awful state of the time, and not myself, or my own justification, is my true object in what I now write, or in what I shall ever write or say.
What might have been well enough, and have been received with a veneration mixed with awe and terror, from an old, severe, crabbed Cato, would have wanted something of propriety in the young Scipios, the ornament of the Roman nobility, in…
There are crimes, undoubtedly there are crimes, which in all seasons of our existence ought to put a generous antipathy in action,--crimes that provoke an indignant justice, and call forth a warm and animated pursuit.
But be it that this is virtue; be it that there is virtue in this well-selected rigor: yet all virtues are not equally becoming to all men and at all times.
I have done all I could to discountenance their inquiries into the fortunes of those who hold large portions of wealth without any apparent merit of their own.
Had the economy of selection and proportion been at all times observed, we should not now have had an overgrown Duke of Bedford, to oppress the industry of humble men, and to limit, by the standard of his own conceptions, the justice, the…
No state, since the foundation of society, has been impoverished by that species of profusion.
If none but meritorious service or real talent were to be rewarded, this nation has not wanted, and this nation will not want, the means of rewarding all the service it ever will receive, and encouraging all the merit it ever will produce.
It shuts one door to impudent importunity, only to open another, and a wider, to unpresuming merit.
Politicians like Edmund Burke
