What we did was in truth and substance, and in a constitutional light, a revolution, not made, but prevented.
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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The one was to be resisted, the other was to be managed and directed; but in neither case was the order of the state to be changed, lest government might be ruined, which ought only to be corrected and legalized.
With us it was the case of a legal monarch attempting arbitrary power; in France it is the case of an arbitrary monarch beginning, from whatever cause, to legalize his authority.
In truth, the circumstances of our Revolution (as it is called) and that of France are just the reverse of each other in almost every particular, and in the whole spirit of the transaction.
He felt some concern that this strange thing called a Revolution in France should be compared with the glorious event commonly called the Revolution in England, and the conduct of the soldiery on that occasion compared with the behavior of…
What a dreadful thing is a standing army for the conduct of the whole or any part of which no man is responsible!
An armed disciplined body is, in its essence, dangerous to liberty; undisciplined, it is ruinous to society.
He knew too well, and he felt as much as any man, how difficult it was to accommodate a standing army to a free constitution, or to any constitution.
That this cause of theirs was not an enemy to servitude, but to society.
Their conduct was one of the fruits of that anarchic spirit from the evils of which a democracy itself was to be resorted to, by those who were the least disposed to that form, as a sort of refuge.
These soldiers were not citizens, but base, hireling mutineers, and mercenary, sordid deserters, wholly destitute of any honorable principle.
That the worst effect of all their proceeding was on their military, which was rendered an army for every purpose but that of defence.
That, if they should perfectly succeed in what they propose, as they are likely enough to do, and establish a democracy, or a mob of democracies, in a country circumstanced like France, they will establish a very bad government,--a very…
They brought themselves into all the calamities they suffer, not that through them they might obtain a British constitution; they plunged themselves headlong into those calamities to prevent themselves from settling into that constitution…
Freedom, and a better security for freedom than that they have taken, they might have had without any sacrifice at all.
The sacrifice they made of the peace and power of their country was not made on the altar of freedom.
By this mad declaration they subverted the state, and brought on such calamities as no country, without a long war, has ever been known to suffer, and which may in the end produce such a war, and perhaps many such.
When they had done this, they instantly, and with the most atrocious perfidy and breach of all faith among men, laid the axe to the root of all property, and consequently of all national prosperity, by the principles they established and…
They first destroyed all the balances and counterpoises which serve to fix the state and to give it a steady direction, and which furnish sure correctives to any violent spirit which may prevail in any of the orders.
Instead of redressing grievances, and improving the fabric of their state, to which they were called by their monarch and sent by their country, they were made to take a very different course.
Their business, had they been either virtuous or wise, or had been left to their own judgment, was to secure the stability and independence of the states, according to those orders, under the monarch on the throne.
The French have made their way, through the destruction of their country, to a bad constitution, when they were absolutely in possession of a good one.
All the horrors and all the crimes of the anarchy which led to their Revolution, which attend its progress, and which may virtually attend it in its establishment, pass for nothing with the lovers of revolutions.
They had gloried (and some people in England had thought fit to take share in that glory) in making a Revolution, as if revolutions were good things in themselves.
In his opinion, anything which unnecessarily tore to pieces the contexture of the state not only prevented all real reformation, but introduced evils which would call, but perhaps call in vain, for new reformation.
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