Before society, in a multitude of men, it is obvious that sovereignty and subjection are ideas which cannot exist.
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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I do not know why a statesman out of place is not to be judged in the same manner, unless we can excuse him by pleading in his favor a total indifference to principle, and that he would act and think in quite a different way, if he were in…
But, in reality, their maxim was, and is, "Peace and alliance with France, and war with the rest of the world.
There is no point which the faction of fraternity in England have labored more than to excite in the poor the horror of any war with France upon any occasion.
All the props of society would be drawn from us by these doctrines, and the very foundations of the public defence would give way in an instant.
Under any circumstances this doctrine is highly dangerous, as it tends to make separate parties of the higher and lower orders, and to put their interests on a different bottom.
They insist that even the war which with so much boldness they have declared against all nations is to prevent the poor from becoming the instruments and victims of these persons and descriptions.
They pretend that the destruction of kings, nobles, and the aristocracy of burghers and rich men is the only means of establishing an universal and perpetual peace.
The ruling Jacobins insist upon it, that even the wars which they carry on with so much obstinacy against all nations are made to prevent the poor from any longer being the instruments and victims of kings, nobles, and the aristocracy of…
It is fatally known that the great object of the Jacobin system is, to excite the lowest description of the people to range themselves under ambitious men for the pillage and destruction of the more eminent orders and classes of the…
It is at least as unjustifiable to inflame the passions of such judges against that side in favor of which they cannot so much as comprehend the arguments.
Nothing, in a general sense, appears to me less fair and justifiable (even if no attempt were made to inflame the passions) than to submit a matter on discussion to a tribunal incapable of judging of more than one side of the question.
The causes of a war are not matters of feeling, but of reason and foresight, and often of remote considerations, and of a very great combination of circumstances which they are utterly incapable of comprehending: and, indeed, it is not…
The ground of a political war is of all things that which the poor laborer and manufacturer are the least capable of conceiving.
Under a specious appearance, (not uncommonly put on by men of unscrupulous ambition,) that of tenderness and compassion to the poor, he did his best to appeal to the judgments of the meanest and most ignorant of the people on the merits of…
Indeed, no man can look on the present posture of Europe with the least degree of discernment, who will not be thoroughly convinced that England must be the fast friend or the determined enemy of France.
They would know that Parliament, at all hazards, would force the king to a separate peace.
In its consequences, the surrender of Savoy was to make a surrender to France of Switzerland and Italy, of both which countries Savoy is the key,--as it is known to ordinary speculators in politics, though it may not be known to the…
But to surrender Savoy was to surrender a great deal more than so many square acres of land or so much revenue.
But supposing the combined powers had been all thus faithless, and been all alike so, there was one circumstance which made an essential difference between them and France.
Fox's disgraceful proposal been complied with, this kingdom would have been stained with a blot of perfidy hitherto without an example in our history, and with far less excuse than any act of perfidy which we find in the history of any…
Whatever the merits of his rule may be in the eyes of neutral judges, it is a rule which no statesman before him ever laid down in favor of the adverse power with whom he was to negotiate.
This rule, in fact, would not only have left to the faction in France all the property and power they had usurped at home, but most, if not all, of the conquests which by their atrocious perfidy and violence they had made abroad.
The whole proceeding of the French administration was the most remote that could be imagined from furnishing any indication of a pacific disposition: for at the very time in which it was pretended that the Jacobins entertained those…
In short, the whole of these resolutions appeared to have but one drift, namely, the sacrifice of our own domestic dignity and safety, and the independency of Europe, to the support of this strange mixture of anarchy and tyranny which…
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