If it should ever be totally extinguished, the loss, I fear, will be great.
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 derogates little from his fortitude, while it adds infinitely to the honor of his humanity.
It is a topic of consolation which our ordinary of Newgate would be too humane to use to a criminal at the foot of the gallows.
This assembly, which overthrows kings and kingdoms, has not even the physiognomy and aspect of a grave legislative body,--nec color imperii, nec frons erat ulla senatûs.
Nor is it in these clubs alone that the public measures are deformed into monsters.
I must believe, that, as a nation, it overwhelmed you with shame and horror.
For, considering their speculative designs as of infinite value, and the actual arrangement of the state as of no estimation, they are, at best, indifferent about it.
Finding their schemes of politics not adapted to the state of the world in which they live, they often come to think lightly of all public principle, and are ready, on their part, to abandon for a very trivial interest what they find of…
It is with them a war or a revolution, or it is nothing.
These professors, finding their extreme principles not applicable to cases which call only for a qualified, or, as I may say, civil and legal resistance, in such cases employ no resistance at all.
In the ordinary state of things, it produces in a country like ours the worst effects, even on the cause of that liberty which it abuses with the dissoluteness of an extravagant speculation.
But what convulsion in the political world ought to be a subject of lamentation, if it be attended with so desirable an effect?" You see with what a steady eye these gentlemen are prepared to view the greatest calamities which can befall…
One set is for destroying the civil power through the ecclesiastical; another for demolishing the ecclesiastic through the civil.
The Revolution, which is resorted to for a title, on their system, wants a title itself.
Another revolution, to get rid of this illegitimate and usurped government, would of course be perfectly justifiable, if not absolutely necessary.
They must therefore look on this gross and palpable defect of representation, this fundamental grievance, (so they call it,) as a thing not only vicious in itself, but as rendering our whole government absolutely illegitimate, and not at…
Are the citizens of London to be drawn from their allegiance by feeding them at the expense of their fellow-subjects?
Are the curates to be seduced from their bishops by holding out to them the delusive hope of a dole out of the spoils of their own order?
For this great end is the army to be seduced from its discipline and its fidelity, first by every kind of debauchery, and then by the terrible precedent of a donative in the increase of pay?
Are all orders, ranks, and distinctions to be confounded, that out of universal anarchy, joined to national bankruptcy, three or four thousand democracies should be formed into eighty-three, and that they may all, by some sort of unknown…
Are all the taxes to be voted grievances, and the revenue reduced to a patriotic contribution or patriotic presents?
Are the Church lands to be sold to Jews and jobbers, or given to bribe new-invented municipal republics into a participation in sacrilege?
Is every landmark of the country to be done away in favor of a geometrical and arithmetical constitution?
Is our monarchy to be annihilated, with all the laws, all the tribunals, and all the ancient corporations of the kingdom?
But allowing this, we are led to a very natural question:--What is that cause of liberty, and what are those exertions in its favor, to which the example of France is so singularly auspicious?
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