After having made ineffectual efforts to restore him, they must at length give peace to their people, and come to an accommodation with the usurper, and for that purpose treat with him as with a lawful sovereign.
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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We may say here, what we have said on a personal alliance: however just the cause of that king may be who is driven from the throne either by his subjects or by a foreign usurper, his aides are not obliged to support an eternal war in his…
However, when this change renders the alliance useless, dangerous, or disagreeable, it may renounce it; for it may say, upon a good foundation, that it would not have entered into an alliance with that nation, had it been under the present…
But it ought to be remembered that an ally of the state or the nation is not its judge.
An ally ought, doubtless, to be defended against every invasion, against every foreign violence, and even against his rebellious subjects: in the same manner a republic ought to be defended against the enterprises of one who attempts to…
In doubtful cases, and when the body of the nation has not pronounced, or HAS NOT PRONOUNCED FREELY, a sovereign may naturally support and defend an ally; and it is then that the voluntary law of nations subsists between different states.
If the body of the nation declares the king deprived of his rights by the abuse he has made of them, and deposes him, it may justly do it when its grievances are well founded, and no other power has a right to censure it.
But who shall judge if the king be dethroned lawfully or by violence?
As to those monsters, who, under the title of sovereigns, render themselves the scourges and horror of the human race,--these are savage beasts, from which every brave man may justly purge the earth.
But no power avoids complaining of an atrocious injury, if any one attempts by his emissaries to excite his subjects to revolt.
It is a violation of the law of nations to persuade those subjects to revolt who actually obey their sovereign, though they complain of his government.
When the bands of the political society are broken, or at least suspended between the sovereign and his people, they may then be considered as two distinct powers; and since each is independent of all foreign authority, nobody has a right…
He who assists an odious tyrant, he who declares FOR AN UNJUST AND REBELLIOUS PEOPLE, offends against his duty.
Whenever, therefore, a civil war is kindled in a state, foreign powers may assist that party which appears to them to have justice on their side.
If the prince, attacking the fundamental laws, gives his subjects a legal right to resist him, if tyranny, becoming insupportable, obliges the nation to rise in their defence, every foreign power has a right to succor an oppressed people…
But if, by constant maxims, and by a continued conduct, one nation shows that it has evidently this pernicious disposition, and that it considers no right as sacred, the safety of the human race requires that it should be suppressed.
In particular cases, liable to the least doubt, it ought to be supposed that each of the parties may have some right; and the injustice of that which has committed the injury may proceed from error, and not from a general contempt of…
We do not here forget the maxim established in our preliminaries, that it does not belong to nations to usurp the power of being judges of each other.
Now that they are no longer a matter of sagacity, but of experience, of recent experience, of our own experience, it would be unjustifiable to go back to the records of other times to instruct us to manage what they never enabled us to…
I therefore am not so ready as some are to tax with folly or cowardice those who were not prepared to meet an evil of this nature.
Yet for four years we have seen loans made, treasuries supplied, and armies levied and maintained, more numerous than France ever showed in the field, by the effects of fear alone.
This, for one, I confess I did not foresee, though all the rest was present to me very early, and not out of my apprehension even for several years.
Who could have imagined that atheism could produce one of the most violently operative principles of fanaticism?
How many could have thought that the most complete and formidable revolution in a great empire should be made by men of letters, not as subordinate instruments and trumpeters of sedition, but as the chief contrivers and managers, and in a…
This is what history or books of speculation could hardly have taught us.
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