I am sure the natural feeling, as I have just said, is a far more predominant ingredient in this war than in that of any other that ever was waged by this kingdom.
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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If the war made to prevent the union of two crowns upon one head was a just war, this, which is made to prevent the tearing all crowns from all heads which ought to wear them, and with the crowns to smite off the sacred heads themselves…
If a war to prevent Louis the Fourteenth from imposing his religion was just, a war to prevent the murderers of Louis the Sixteenth from imposing their irreligion upon us is just: a war to prevent the operation of a system which makes life…
You, who have looked at this matter with as fair and impartial an eye as can be united with a feeling heart, you will not think it an hardy assertion, when I affirm that it were far better to be conquered by any other nation than to have…
They who are to live in the vicinity of this new fabric are to prepare to live in perpetual conspiracies and seditions, and to end at last in being conquered, if not to her dominion, to her resemblance.
To live under the continual dread of such immeasurable evils is itself a grievous calamity.
To live without the dread of them is to turn the danger into the disaster.
The influence of such a France is equal to a war, its example more wasting than an hostile irruption.
A government of the nature of that set up at our very door has never been hitherto seen or even imagined in Europe.
It is a serious thing to have a connection with a people who live only under positive, arbitrary, and changeable institutions,--and those not perfected nor supplied nor explained by any common, acknowledged rule of moral science.
France, since her Revolution, is under the sway of a sect whose leaders have deliberately, at one stroke, demolished the whole body of that jurisprudence which France had pretty nearly in common with other civilized countries.
In that jurisprudence were contained the elements and principles of the law of nations, the great ligament of mankind.
No man, in a public or private concern, can divine by what rule or principle her judgments are to be directed: nor is there to be found a professor in any university, or a practitioner in any court, who will hazard an opinion of what is or…
They have not only annulled all their old treaties, but they have renounced the law of nations, from whence treaties have their force.
In describing the nuisance erected by so pestilential a manufactory, by the construction of so infamous a brothel, by digging a night-cellar for such thieves, murderers, and house-breakers as never infested the world, I am so far from…
The example of what is done by France is too important not to have a vast and extensive influence; and that example, backed with its power, must bear with great force on those who are near it, especially on those who shall recognize the…
It violates the rights upon which not only the community of France, but those on which all communities are founded.
They who (though with the purest intentions) recognize the authority of these regicides and robbers upon principle justify their acts, and establish them as precedents.
It is a question not between France and England; it is a question between property and force.
They who massacre, plunder, and expel the body of the proprietary are murderers and robbers.
The state, in its essence, must be moral and just: and it may be so, though a tyrant or usurper should be accidentally at the head of it.
It is a destruction and decomposition of the whole society; which never can be made of right by any faction, however powerful, nor without terrible consequences to all about it, both in the act and in the example.
This pretended republic is founded in crimes, and exists by wrong and robbery; and wrong and robbery, far from a title to anything, is war with mankind.
To be at peace with robbery is to be an accomplice with it.
Nation is a moral essence, not a geographical arrangement, or a denomination of the nomenclator.
Politicians like Edmund Burke
