His abilities are fully equal (and that is to say much for any man) to those which are opposed to him.
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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But if we look to him as our security against the consequences of a Regicide peace, let us be assured that a Regicide peace and a constitutional ministry are terms that will not agree.
With a Regicide peace the king cannot long have a minister to serve him, nor the minister a king to serve.
In this crisis I must hold my tongue or I must speak with freedom.
Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever: but, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth.
It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure, that he may speak it the longer.
But as the same rules do not hold in all cases, what would be right for you, who may presume on a series of years before you, would have no sense for me, who cannot, without absurdity, calculate on six months of life.
It may have the weakness, but it has the sincerity, of a dying declaration.
For the few days I have to linger here I am removed completely from the busy scene of the world; but I hold myself to be still responsible for everything that I have done whilst I continued on the place of action.
When I seem not to acquiesce in the acts of those I respect in every degree short of superstition, I am obliged to give my reasons fully.
But to exert reason is not to revolt against authority.
Reason and authority do not move in the same parallel.
But in converting this intrigue into a mission for peace, the English ministry joined to the hope of giving a new enemy to France that of justifying the continuance of the war in the eyes of the English nation, and of throwing all the…
On that ground, I must therefore again recall your mind to our original opinions, which time and events have not taught me to vary.
My ideas and my principles led me, in this contest, to encounter France, not as a state, but as a faction.
It is the faction that makes them truly dreadful.
That faction is the evil spirit that possesses the body of France,--that informs it as a soul,--that stamps upon its ambition, and upon all its pursuits, a characteristic mark, which strongly distinguishes them from the same general…
It is that spirit which inspires into them a new, a pernicious, a desolating activity.
A sure destruction impends over those infatuated princes who, in the conflict with this new and unheard-of power, proceed as if they were engaged in a war that bore a resemblance to their former contests, or that they can make peace in the…
I conceived that the contest, once begun, could not be laid down again, to be resumed at our discretion, but that our first struggle with this evil would also be our last.
I never thought we could make peace with the system; because it was not for the sake of an object we pursued in rivalry with each other, but with the system itself that we were at war.
As I understood the matter, we were at war, not with its conduct, but with its existence,--convinced that its existence and its hostility were the same.
Where it least appears in action, it is still full of life.
In its sleep it recruits its strength and prepares its exertion.
Its spirit lies deep in the corruptions of our common nature.
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