Am I to transfer to the intruders, who, not content to turn you out naked to the world, would rob you of your very name, all the esteem and respect I owe to you?
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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In such a case, is it in the faction of robbers I am to look for my country?
Would this be the England that you and I, and even strangers, admired, honored, loved, and cherished?
Would not the exiles of England alone be my government and my fellow-citizens?
Would not all my duties and all my affections be there, and there only?
Should I consider myself as a traitor to my country, and deserving of death, if I knocked at the door and heart of every potentate in Christendom to succor my friends, and to avenge them on their enemies?
Could I in any way show myself more a patriot?
What should I think of those potentates who insulted their suffering brethren,--who treated them as vagrants, or at least as mendicants,--and could find no allies, no friends, but in regicide murderers and robbers?
What would be our sentiments, if in that miserable service we were not to be considered either as English, or as Swedes, Dutch, Danes, but as outcasts of the human race?
What should we feel under this inhuman, insulting, and barbarous protection of Muscovites, Swedes, or Hollanders?
Should we not obtest Heaven, and whatever justice there is yet on earth?
Oppression makes wise men mad; but the distemper is still the madness of the wise, which is better than the sobriety of fools.
Their cry is the voice of sacred misery, exalted, not into wild raving, but into the sanctified frenzy of prophecy and inspiration.
Would not this warm language of high indignation have more of sound reason in it, more of real affection, more of true attachment, than all the lullabies of flatterers who would hush monarchs to sleep in the arms of death?
Whilst kings stand firm on their base, though under that base there is a sure-wrought mine, there will not be wanting to their levees a single person of those who are attached to their fortune, and not to their persons or cause; but…
This example we shall give, if, instead of adhering to our fellows in a cause which is an honor to us all, we abandon the lawful government and lawful corporate body of France, to hunt for a shameful and ruinous fraternity with this odious…
If it had no force to prevent us from submitting to this necessary war, it furnishes no better ground for our making an unnecessary and ruinous peace.
There are many things which men do not approve, that they must do to avoid a greater evil.
Because we have done one humiliating act, we ought with infinite caution to admit more acts of the same nature, lest humiliation should become our habitual state.
I, for one, do more than doubt the policy of this kind of convention with Algiers.
I can contemplate without dread a royal or a national tiger on the borders of Pegu.
I can look at him with an easy curiosity, as prisoner within bars in the menagerie of the Tower.
But in this parallel it is the cat that is at a distance, and the lions and tigers that are in our antechambers and our lobbies.
When we voted, as you and I did, with many more whom you and I respect and love, to resist this enemy, we were providing for dangers that were direct, home, pressing, and not remote, contingent, uncertain, and formed upon loose analogies.
I thought the insolent, unprovoked aggression of the Regicide upon our ally of Holland a good ground of war.
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