The king whom he gave us was, indeed, the very reverse of your benignant sovereign, who, in reward for his attempt to bestow liberty on his subjects, languishes himself in prison.
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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But it must be admitted that Monk freed this nation from great and just apprehensions both of future anarchy and of probable tyranny in some form or other.
The present tyrants want no arguments to prove, what they must daily feel, that no good army can exist on their principles.
Caution is for those who have something to lose.
The new school of murder and barbarism set up in Paris, having destroyed (so far as in it lies) all the other manners and principles which have hitherto civilized Europe, will destroy also the mode of civilized war, which, more than…
The hell-hounds of war, on all sides, will be uncoupled and unmuzzled.
This will beget acts of retaliation from you; and every retaliation will beget a new revenge.
All war, which is not battle, will be military execution.
They whose known policy it is to assassinate every citizen whom they suspect to be discontented by their tyranny, and to corrupt the soldiery of every open enemy, must look for no modified hostility.
If, by effectual punishment of the guilty, they do not wholly disavow that practice, and the threat of it too, as any part of their policy, if ever a foreign prince enters into France, he must enter it as into a country of assassins.
Dreadful, however, will be the consequences of their attempt to avoid the evils of war by the merciful policy of murder.
They boast that they operated their usurpation rather by terror than by force, and that a few seasonable murders have prevented the bloodshed of many battles.
This infamous, cruel, and cowardly practice of assassination they have the impudence to call merciful.
They know that he who fears God fears nothing else; and therefore they eradicate from the mind, through their Voltaire, their Helvétius, and the rest of that infamous gang, that only sort of fear which generates true courage.
It is thus, and for the same end, that they endeavor to destroy that tribunal of conscience which exists independently of edicts and decrees.
By these principles, every considerable father of a family loses the sanctuary of his house.
They propagate principles by which every servant may think it, if not his duty, at least his privilege, to betray his master.
To destroy that order, they vitiate the whole community.
The great object of your tyrants is to destroy the gentlemen of France; and for that purpose they destroy, to the best of their power, all the effect of those relations which may render considerable men powerful or even safe.
This I confess makes me nearly despair of any attempt upon the minds of their followers, through reason, honor, or conscience.
These writers make even virtue a pander to vice.
But the general spirit and tendency of his works is mischievous,--and the more mischievous for this mixture: for perfect depravity of sentiment is not reconcilable with eloquence; and the mind (though corruptible, not complexionally…
These occupy our minds; they give us another taste and turn; and will not suffer us to be more than transiently amused with paradoxical morality.
Perhaps bold speculations are more acceptable because more new to you than to us, who have been, long since satiated with them.
We certainly perceive, and to a degree we feel, in this writer, a style glowing, animated, enthusiastic, at the same time that we find it lax, diffuse, and not in the best taste of composition,--all the members of the piece being pretty…
Politicians like Edmund Burke
