The day that, by their consent, the seat of Regicide has its place among the thrones of Europe, there is no longer a motive for zeal in their favor; it will at best be cold, unimpassioned, dejected, melancholy duty.
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 friends of the crown will appear, not as champions, but as victims; discountenanced, mortified, lowered, defeated, they will fall into listlessness and indifference.
This nefarious villain (for a few days I may call him so) stands high in France, as in a republic of robbers and murderers he ought.
The wish of the more exalted Tallien, when he sat in judgment, was, that his sovereign had eighty-three heads, that he might send one to every one of the Departments.
We shall then have a French ambassador without a suspicion of Popery.
A theatrical, bombastic, windy phraseology of heroic virtue, blended and mingled up with a worse dissoluteness, and joined to a murderous and savage ferocity, forms the tone and idiom of their language and their manners.
Let it be remembered that no young man can go to any part of Europe without taking this place of pestilential contagion in his way; and whilst the less active part of the community will be debauched by this travel, whilst children are…
No factory will be settled in France, that will not become a club of complete French Jacobins.
The minds of young men of that description will receive a taint in their religion, their morals, and their politics, which they will in a short time communicate to the whole kingdom.
Whilst everything prepares the body to debauch and the mind to crime, a regular church of avowed atheism, established by law, with a direct and sanguinary persecution of Christianity, is formed to prevent all amendment and remorse.
Conscience is formally deposed from its dominion over the mind.
What fills the measure of horror is, that schools of atheism are set up at the public charge in every part of the country.
Better this island should be sunk to the bottom of the sea than that (so far as human infirmity admits) it should not be a country of religion and morals!
With all these causes of corruption, we may well judge what the general fashion of mind will be through both sexes and all conditions.
Such spectacles and such examples will overbear all the laws that ever blackened the cumbrous volumes of our statutes.
Will any one presume, against both authority and opinion, to hold up this unfashionable, antiquated, exploded Constitution?
The Jacobin faction in England must grow in strength and audacity; it will be supported by other intrigues and supplied by other resources than yet we have seen in action.
But who will answer for the temper of a House of Commons elected under these circumstances?
Who will answer for the courage of a House of Commons to arm the crown with the extraordinary powers that it may demand?
The peers ought naturally to be the pillars of the crown; but when their titles are rendered contemptible, and their property invidious, and a part of their weakness, and not of their strength, they will be found so many degraded and…
Both Houses will be in perpetual oscillation between abortive attempts at energy and still more unsuccessful attempts at compromise.
You will be impatient of your disease, and abhorrent of your remedy.
A spirit of subterfuge and a tone of apology will enter into all your proceedings, whether of law or legislation.
The awful frown of criminal justice will be smoothed into the silly smile of seduction.
It is unnatural to suppose, that, in making an accommodation, the Americans should not choose rather to give credit to those who all along have opposed the measure of ministers, than to throw themselves wholly on the mercy of their bitter…
Politicians like Edmund Burke
