The social order which restrains it feeds it.
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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Everywhere else the faction is militant; in France it is triumphant.
In France is the bank of deposit and the bank of circulation of all the pernicious principles that are forming in every state.
It will be a folly scarcely deserving of pity, and too mischievous for contempt, to think of restraining it in any other country whilst it is predominant there.
The true nature of a Jacobin war, in the beginning, was by most of the Christian powers felt, acknowledged, and even in the most precise manner declared.
As long as these powers flattered themselves that the menace of force would produce the effect of force, they acted on those declarations; but when their menaces failed of success, their efforts took a new direction.
It did not appear to them that virtue and heroism ought to be purchased by millions of rix-dollars.
It is a dreadful truth, but it is a truth that cannot be concealed: in ability, in dexterity, in the distinctness of their views, the Jacobins are our superiors.
They saw the thing right from the very beginning.
Whatever were the first motives to the war among politicians, they saw that in its spirit, and for its objects, it was a civil war; and as such they pursued it.
It is a war between the partisans of the ancient civil, moral, and political order of Europe against a sect of fanatical and ambitious atheists which means to change them all.
It is not France extending a foreign empire over other nations: it is a sect aiming at universal empire, and beginning with the conquest of France.
The leaders of that sect secured the centre of Europe; and that secured, they knew, that, whatever might be the event of battles and sieges, their cause was victorious.
That once well laid as a basis of empire, opportunities never could be wanting to regain or to replace what had been lost, and dreadfully to avenge themselves on the faction of their adversaries.
In truth, the tribe of vulgar politicians are the lowest of our species.
There is no trade so vile and mechanical as government in their hands.
A large, liberal, and prospective view of the interests of states passes with them for romance, and the principles that recommend it for the wanderings of a disordered imagination.
The jesters and buffoons shame them out of everything grand and elevated.
Littleness in object and in means to them appears soundness and sobriety.
They think there is nothing worth pursuit, but that which they can handle, which they can measure with a two-foot rule, which they can tell upon ten fingers.
But the security wanted was against a kind of power which was not so truly dangerous in its fortresses nor in its territories as in its spirit and its principles.
If armies and fortresses were a defence against Jacobinism, Louis the Sixteenth would this day reign a powerful monarch over an happy people.
The greatest skill, conducting the greatest military apparatus, has been employed; but it has been worse than uselessly employed, through the false policy of the war.
If the same spirit continues, when peace is made, the peace will fix and perpetuate all the errors of the war; because it will be made upon the same false principle.
An arrangement of peace in its nature is a permanent settlement: it is the effect of counsel and deliberation, and not of fortuitous events.
Politicians like Edmund Burke
