Even the fundamental sacred rights of man they have not scrupled to profane.
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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I speak it emphatically, and with a desire that it should be marked,--in a long war; because, without such a war, no experience has yet told us that a dangerous power has ever been reduced to measure or to reason.
We shall find that in all that period of twenty-four years there were hardly five that could be called a season of peace; and the interval between the two wars was in reality nothing more than a very active preparation for renovated…
It is for us at present to recollect what we have been, and to consider what, if we please, we may be still.
Ireland, now so large a source of the common opulence and power, and which, wisely managed, might be made much more beneficial and much more effective, was then the heaviest of the burdens.
It is made, if ever war was made, to touch all the great springs of action in the human breast.
The calculation of profit in all such wars is false.
With a fixed design they have outlawed themselves, and to their power outlawed all other nations.
Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.
I certainly should dread more from a wild-cat in my bedchamber than from all the lions that roar in the deserts behind Algiers.
We judged of the danger with which we were menaced by Jacobin France from the whole tenor of her conduct, not from one or two doubtful or detached acts or expressions.
While these dispositions shall be persisted in, nothing is left for the king but to prosecute a war equally just and necessary.
Will the Allies, then, give away their ancient patrimony, that England may keep islands in the West Indies?
The state has dominion and conquest for its sole objects,--dominion over minds by proselytism, over bodies by arms.
A silent revolution in the moral world preceded the political, and prepared it.
All the former correctives, whether of virtue or of weakness, which existed in the old monarchy, are gone.
We ought to have acted under her auspices, in extending her salutary influence upon every side.
Nature is never more truly herself than in her grandest forms.
I hope I misunderstand this pledge,--or that we shall show no more regard to it than we have done to all the faith that we have plighted to vigor and resolution in our former Declaration.
We seem to have cut ourselves off from any benefit which an intermediate state of things might furnish to enable us totally to overturn that power, so little connected with moderation and justice.
I cannot help asking, Why all this pains to clear the British nation of ambition, perfidy, and the insatiate thirst of war?
Let us descend into our own bosoms; let us ask ourselves what are our duties, and what are our means of discharging them.
His active Will-o'-the-wisp may be gone nobody can guess where, whilst he leaves us bemired and benighted in the bog.
No fewer than ten sovereign princes had, some the whole, all a very considerable part of their dominions under the yoke of that dreadful faction.
These conquests eventually will be the cause of her destruction." So that they who hate the cause of usurpation, and dread the power of France under any form, are to wish her to be a conqueror, in order to accelerate her ruin.
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