Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
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 doubt much, very much indeed, whether France is at all ripe for liberty on any standard.
The wretched scheme of your present masters is not to fit the Constitution to the people, but wholly to destroy conditions, to dissolve relations, to change the state of the nation, and to subvert property, in order to fit their country to…
This constitution by Estates was the natural and only just representation of France.
When was it that a king of England wanted wherewithal to make him respected, courted, or perhaps even feared, in every state in Europe?
He is a real king, and not an executive officer.
I believe, Sir, that many on the Continent altogether mistake the condition of a king of Great Britain.
But this adaptation of contending parts, as it has not been in ours, so it can never be in yours, or in any country, the effect of a single instantaneous regulation, and no sound heads could ever think of doing it in that manner.
The parts of our Constitution have gradually, and almost insensibly, in a long course of time, accommodated themselves to each other, and to their common as well as to their separate purposes.
I will keep myself as untainted by it as I can.
A certain intemperance of intellect is the disease of the time, and the source of all its other diseases.
But if you are not in a condition to frame a House of Lords, still less are you capable, in my opinion, of framing anything which virtually and substantially could be answerable (for the purposes of a stable, regular government) to our…
If you were now to form such an House of Peers, it would bear, in my opinion, but little resemblance to ours, in its origin, character, or the purposes which it might answer, at the same time that it would destroy your true natural…
Do you think, that, under the name of a British Constitution, I mean to recommend to you such Lords, made of such kind of stuff?
I know, that, with you, a set of men of rank have betrayed their constituents, their honor, their trust, their king, and their country, and levelled themselves with their footmen, that through this degradation they might afterwards put…
I believed the ancient principles to be wise in all cases of a large empire that would be free.
I meant to recommend the principles from which it has grown, and the policy on which it has been progressively improved out of elements common to you and to us.
When I praised the British Constitution, and wished it to be well studied, I did not mean that its exterior form and positive arrangement should become a model for you or for any people servilely to copy.
Thus the potion which was given to strengthen the Constitution, to heal divisions, and to compose the minds of men, became the source of debility, frenzy, discord, and utter dissolution.
If we do not attend scrupulously to all these, the medicine of to-day becomes the poison of to-morrow.
What a number of faults have led to this multitude of misfortunes, and almost all from this one source,--that of considering certain general maxims, without attending to circumstances, to times, to places, to conjunctures, and to actors!
These changes, unquestionably, the king had no right to make; and here the Parliaments failed in their duty, and, along with their country, have perished by this failure.
It ought to have sounded the alarm to the whole nation, as it had often done on things of infinitely less importance.
These deviations (as guardians of the ancient laws, usages, and Constitution of the kingdom) the Parliament of Paris ought not to have suffered, without the strongest remonstrances to the throne.
What must be the prudence of those who could think, in the then known temper of the people of Paris, of assembling the States at a place situated as Versailles?
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