No peer has condescended to superintend with more vigilance the declining franchises of the poor commons.
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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Nobody is less of a visionary theorist; nobody has drawn his speculations more from practice.
It belongs only to the chosen few, who are born to the hereditary representation of the whole democracy, and who leave nothing at all, no, not the offal, to us poor outcasts of the plebeian race.
If that could be allowed, perhaps I might sometimes (by accident, and without an unpardonable crime) trust as much to my own very careful and very laborious, though perhaps somewhat purblind disquisitions, as to their soaring, intuitive…
I give due credit to the censorial brow, to the broad phylacteries, and to the imposing gravity of those magisterial rabbins and doctors in the cabala of political science.
I confess that I have acted on my own principles of government, and not on those of his Grace, which are, I dare say, profound and wise, but which I do not pretend to understand.
If I have written or spoken so poorly as to be quite forgot, a fresh apology will not make a more lasting impression.
These priests (I hope they will excuse me, I mean priests of the Rights of Man) begin by crowning me with their flowers and their fillets, and bedewing me with their odors, as a preface to their knocking me on the head with their…
But the truth is, (with great deference to his Grace I say it,) Citizen Paine acted without any provocation at all; he acted solely from the native impulses of his own excellent heart.
He is ready to blaspheme his God, to insult his king, and to libel the Constitution of his country, without any provocation from me or any encouragement from his Grace.
I found myself elevated with this honor; for, even by the collision of resistance, to be the means of striking out sparkles of truth, if not merit, is at least felicity.
A toast is good, and a bumper is not bad: but the best toasts may be so often repeated as to disgust the palate, and ceaseless rounds of bumpers may nauseate and overload the stomach.
The people of the Netherlands, by their Constitution, are as much entitled to be called free as any nation upon earth.
They consider the content with which men live under those governments as stupidity, and all attachment to religion as the effect of the grossest ignorance.
Without any distinction in their several sects and parties, they agree in treating all nations who will not conform their government, laws, manners, and religion to the new French fashion, as an herd of slaves.
He waits the moment when the passions give way; he waits till reason shall preside, and till the multitude shall listen to her voice.
You forget, then, that you have often established an insulting equality between them and men covered with crimes and made up of ignominy.
The suspicions of a good citizen freeze those men whom the calumny of the wicked could not stop in their progress.
Suspicion, if it does not stain the soul of a courageous man, at least arrests his thoughts in their passage to his lips.
You quite forget, then, honest men are the objects of your suspicion.
It is the minority which has made the Revolution of France; it is a minority which, has made the people triumph.
Did not this language energetically enough signify that they looked upon the assignats as a leprosy, and the union as a deadly contagion?
The Belgians have seen in this forced introduction of assignats nothing but a double robbery; and they have only the more violently hated the union with France.
Thus it is that covetousness cut its throat with its own hands.
Thus was anarchy organized amongst the people, that they might be compelled to throw themselves into our arms.
Politicians like Edmund Burke
