Edmund Burke

These abuses accumulated in a length of time, as they must accumulate in every monarchy not under the constant inspection of a popular representative.

But the question is not now of the vices of that monarchy, but of its existence.

Men have been sometimes led by degrees, sometimes hurried, into things of which, if they could have seen the whole together, they never would have permitted the most remote approach.

In the interval between the instructions and the Revolution things changed their shape; and in consequence of that change, the true question at present is, whether those who would have reformed or those who have destroyed are in the right.

Among the standards upon which the effects of government on any country are to be estimated, I must consider the state of its population as not the least certain.

No country in which population flourishes, and is in progressive improvement, can be under a very mischievous government.

The wealth of a country is another, and no contemptible standard, by which we may judge whether, on the whole, a government be protecting or destructive.

The dismissed magistrates are to take their share of martyrdom with the ecclesiastics, or to receive their own property from such a fund and in such a manner as all those who have been seasoned with the ancient principles of jurisprudence…

Even the clergy are to receive their miserable allowance out of the depreciated paper, which is stamped with the indelible character of sacrilege, and with the symbols of their own ruin, or they must starve.

So violent an outrage upon credit, property, and liberty, as this compulsory paper currency, has seldom been exhibited by the alliance of bankruptcy and tyranny, at any time, or in any nation.

When they have rendered that deposed power sufficiently black, they then proceed in argument, as if all those who disapprove of their new abuses must of course be partisans of the old,--that those who reprobate their crude and violent…

Have these gentlemen never heard, in the whole circle of the worlds of theory and practice, of anything between the despotism of the monarch and the despotism of the multitude?

Is it, then, a truth so universally acknowledged, that a pure democracy is the only tolerable form into which human society can be thrown, that a man is not permitted to hesitate about its merits, without the suspicion of being a friend to…

It affects to be a pure democracy, though I think it in a direct train of becoming shortly a mischievous and ignoble oligarchy.

I reprobate no form of government merely upon abstract principles.

Not being wholly unread in the authors who had seen the most of those constitutions, and who best understood them, I cannot help concurring with their opinion, that an absolute democracy no more than absolute monarchy is to be reckoned…

In such a popular persecution, individual sufferers are in a much more deplorable condition than in any other.

By a revolution in the state, the fawning sycophant of yesterday is converted into the austere critic of the present hour.

But steady, independent minds, when they have an object of so serious a concern to mankind as government under their contemplation, will disdain to assume the part of satirists and declaimers.

They will judge of human institutions as they do of human characters.

They will sort out the good from the evil, which is mixed in mortal institutions as it is in mortal men.

Rather too much countenance was given to the spirit of innovation, which soon was turned against those who fostered it, and ended in their ruin.

It is but cold, and no very flattering justice to that fallen monarchy, to say, that, for many years, it trespassed more by levity and want of judgment in several of its schemes than from any defect in diligence or in public spirit.

I shall always, however, consider that liberty as very equivocal in her appearance, which has not wisdom and justice for her companions, and does not lead prosperity and plenty in her train.

Not being illuminated with the light of which the gentlemen of France tell us they have got so abundant a share, they acted under a strong impression of the ignorance and fallibility of mankind.