They may become an object of more or less constant watchfulness and suspicion, as their preservation may best require, but they can never become an object of punishment.
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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And first, the body and mass of the people never ought to be treated as criminal.
But as we have much more reason to fear their feeble lenity than any blamable rigor, we ought, in my opinion, to leave the matter to themselves.
If we screened the body of murderers from their justice, we should only leave the innocent in future to the mercy of men of fierce and sanguinary dispositions, of which, in spite of all our intermeddling in their Constitution, we could not…
Never were the two princes guilty, in the day of their power, of a single hard or ill-natured act.
I am sure it is not justified by anything they have done.
A Jacobin faction, constantly fostered with the nourishment of foreign protection, will be kept alive.
But if we weaken it not only by arbitrary limitations of our own, but preserve such persons in it as are disposed to disturb its future peace, as they have its past, I do not know how a more direct declaration can be made of a disposition…
His task is, to win it: he must leave posterity to enjoy and to adorn it.
He is to contend for it as much after an apparent conquest as before.
He is gone, if he imagines himself the quiet possessor of a throne.
The lawful prince must have, in everything but crime, the character of an usurper.
Whoever claims a right by birth to govern there must find in his breast, or must conjure up in it, an energy not to be expected, perhaps not always to be wished for, in well-ordered states.
But one thing I conceive to be far beyond a doubt: that the settlement cannot be immediate; but that it must be preceded by some sort of power, equal at least in vigor, vigilance, promptitude, and decision, to a military government.
Never was a country so completely ruined; and they who calculate the resurrection of her power by former examples have not sufficiently considered what is the present state of things.
But this distempered strength of France will be the cause of proportionable weakness on its recovery.
France, such as it is, is indeed highly formidable: not formidable, however, as a great republic; but as the most dreadful gang of robbers and murderers that ever was embodied.
So far is France from being formidable to its neighbors for its domestic strength, that I conceive it will be as much as all its neighbors can do, by a steady guaranty, to keep that monarchy at all upon its basis.
It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.
But every other nation will think we shall abuse it.
If we should come to be in a condition not only to have all this ascendant in commerce, but to be absolutely able, without the least control, to hold the commerce of all other nations totally dependent upon our good pleasure, we may say…
It is ridiculous to say we are not men, and that, as men, we shall never wish to aggrandize ourselves in some way or other.
I must fairly say, I dread our own power and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded.
Among precautions against ambition, it may not be amiss to take one precaution against our own.
Germany must pay; or we shall infallibly see Prussia leagued with France and Spain, and possibly with other powers, for the reduction of Austria; and such may be the situation of things, that it will not be so easy to decide what part…
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