Otherwise everything will move in a preposterous order, and nothing but confusion and destruction will follow.
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
This ought to be the primary object of all our politics and all our military operations.
The great means, therefore, of restoring the monarchy, which we have made the main object of the war, is, to assist the dignity, the religion, and the property of France to repossess themselves of the means of their natural influence.
These are the demands (quite natural demands) of those who are ready to follow the standard of monarchy.
They are well entitled, after a bloody war maintained for eight months against all the powers of anarchy, to speak the sentiments of the Royalists of France.
On the contrary, they see that we do not suffer any of those who have shown a zeal in that cause which we seem to make our own to come freely into any place in which the allies obtain any footing.
Some of these nations the people of France are jealous of: such are the English and the Spaniards;--others they despise: such are the Italians;--others they hate and dread: such are the German and Danubian powers.
When they see nothing but bands of English, Spaniards, Neapolitans, Sardinians, Prussians, Austrians, Hungarians, Bohemians, Slavonians, Croatians, acting as principals, it is impossible they should think we come with a beneficent design.
At best, it will appear to such wavering persons, (if such there are,) whom we mean to fix with us, a choice whether they are to continue a prey to domestic banditti, or to be fought for as a carrion carcass and picked to the bone by all…
Where none of the respectable native interests are seen in the transaction, it is impossible that any declarations can convince those that are within, or those that are without, that anything else than some sort of hostility in the style…
What I contend for is, that they should be consulted with, treated with, and employed; and that no foreigners whatsoever are either in interest so engaged, or in judgment and local knowledge so competent to answer all these purposes, as…
Every arm lifted up for royalty from the beginning was the arm of a man so principled.
Property will be most energetically restored by the ancient proprietors of that kingdom.
One would think it requires not a great deal of argument to prove that the most serious endeavors to restore royalty will be made by Royalists.
The first two are so intimately connected as not to be separated even in thought: the reëstablishment of royalty, and the reëstablishment of property.
This being, as I conceive, the true state of France, as it exists territorially, and as it exists morally, the question will be, with whom we are to concert our arrangements, and whom we are to use as our instruments in the reduction, in…
The master of the house is expelled, and the robbers are in possession.
The truth is, that France is out of itself,--the moral France is separated from the geographical.
On the whole, therefore, I lay it down as a certainty, that in the Jacobins no change of mind is to be expected, and that no others in the territory of France have an independent and deliberative existence.
Four fifths of the French inhabitants would thankfully take protection from the emperor of Morocco, and would never trouble their heads about the abstract principles of the power by which they were snatched from imprisonment, robbery, and…
It is a controversy (weak, indeed, and unequal, on the one part) between the proprietor and the robber, between the prisoner and the jailer, between the neck and the guillotine.
These theories are long since gone by; they have had their day, and have done their mischief.
They want no stimulus to throw off this dreadful yoke; but they do want, not manifestoes, which they have had even to surfeit, but real protection, force, and succor.
As to the oppressed individuals, they are many, and as discontented as men must be under the monstrous and complicated tyranny of all sorts with which they are crushed.
So that, in effect, no deliberative capacity exists in any portion of the inhabitants.
Politicians like Edmund Burke
