The pretended rights of man, which have made this havoc, cannot be the rights of the people.
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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It is that voice which every successful usurpation, as well as this before us, may easily procure, even without making (as these tyrants have made) donatives from the spoil of one part of the citizens to corrupt the other.
Had such proceedings been expected, the great probability is, that the people would then have risen, as to a man, to prevent them.
Without drawing on, therefore, very shocking consequences, neither by previous consent, nor by subsequent ratification of a mere reckoned majority, can any set of men attempt to dissolve the state at their pleasure.
This is to make the success of villany the standard of innocence.
On this scheme, the maker of the experiment must begin with a determined perjury.
This is to give a direct sanction to fraud, hypocrisy, perjury, and the breach of the most sacred trusts that can exist between man and man.
When you combine this principle of the right to change a fixed and tolerable constitution of things at pleasure with the theory and practice of the French Assembly, the political, civil, and moral irregularity are, if possible, aggravated.
What can prevent the mere will of any person, who hopes to unite the wills of others to his own, from an attempt wholly to overturn it?
Nor is the new state, fabricated by such arts, safer than the old.
Nothing restrains the tempter; nothing guards the tempted.
If the undertaker fails, he has the misfortune of a rebel, but not the guilt.
Thus, arbitrary will (the last corruption of ruling power) step by step poisons the heart of every citizen.
Every individual must have a right to originate what afterwards is to become the act of the majority.
In this point of view let us a little scrutinize the effects of a right in the mere majority of the inhabitants of any country of superseding and altering their government at pleasure.
I have said that in all political questions the consequences of any assumed rights are of great moment in deciding upon their validity.
Such a multitude can have no sort of title to alter the seat of power in the society, in which it ever ought to be the obedient, and not the ruling or presiding part.
Abating for their want of sensibility to the sufferings of their associates, they are not so much in the wrong; for madness and wickedness are things foul and deformed in themselves, and stand in need of all the coverings and trappings of…
It is a remark liable to as few exceptions as any generality can be, that they who applaud prosperous folly and adore triumphant guilt have never been known to succor or even to pity human weakness or offence, when they become subject to…
With their teacher they were delivered over to the lawyers, who wrote in their blood the statutes of the land, as harshly, and in the same sort of ink, as they and their teachers had written the rights of man.
When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?
Those who attempt by outrage and violence to deprive men of any advantage which they hold under the laws, and to destroy the natural order of life, proclaim war against them.
In all things the voice of this grand chorus of national harmony ought to have a mighty and decisive influence.
When great multitudes act together, under that discipline of Nature, I recognize the PEOPLE.
To give, therefore, no more importance, in the social order, to such descriptions of men than that of so many units is a horrible usurpation.
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