The French have made their way, through the destruction of their country, to a bad constitution, when they were absolutely in possession of a good one.
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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Their business, had they been either virtuous or wise, or had been left to their own judgment, was to secure the stability and independence of the states, according to those orders, under the monarch on the throne.
Instead of redressing grievances, and improving the fabric of their state, to which they were called by their monarch and sent by their country, they were made to take a very different course.
They first destroyed all the balances and counterpoises which serve to fix the state and to give it a steady direction, and which furnish sure correctives to any violent spirit which may prevail in any of the orders.
The commonwealth which acts uniformly upon those principles, and which, after abolishing every festival of religion, chooses the most flagrant act of a murderous regicide treason for a feast of eternal commemoration, and which forces all…
Jacobinism is the revolt of the enterprising talents of a country against its property.
When to these establishments of Regicide, of Jacobinism, and of Atheism, you add the correspondent system of manners, no doubt can be left on the mind of a thinking man concerning their determined hostility to the human race.
Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in.
They give their whole form and color to our lives.
Nothing in the Revolution, no, not to a phrase or a gesture, not to the fashion of a hat or a shoe, was left to accident.
No mechanical means could be devised in favor of this incredible system of wickedness and vice, that has not been employed.
The noblest passions, the love of glory, the love of country, have been debauched into means of its preservation and its propagation.
The foundation of their republic is laid in moral paradoxes.
The whole drift of their institution is contrary to that of the wise legislators of all countries, who aimed at improving instincts into morals, and at grafting the virtues on the stock of the natural affections.
All their new institutions (and with them everything is new) strike at the root of our social nature.
Other legislators, knowing that marriage is the origin of all relations, and consequently the first element of all duties, have endeavored by every art to make it sacred.
The Christian religion, by confining it to the pairs, and by rendering that relation indissoluble, has by these two things done more towards the peace, happiness, settlement, and civilization of the world than by any other part in this…
Those monsters employed the same or greater industry to desecrate and degrade that state, which other legislators have used to render it holy and honorable.
By a strange, uncalled-for declaration, they pronounced that marriage was no better than a common civil contract.
With them the matrimonial connection is brought into so degraded a state of concubinage, that I believe none of the wretches in London who keep warehouses of infamy would give out one of their victims to private custody on so short and…
That the terms of his letter are ambiguous and obscure, such as a guilty man might have recourse to in order to cover his guilt, but such as no innocent man, from whom nothing was required but to clear his innocence by giving plain answers…
In the hands of the Ranna it can be of no prejudice to us; and notwithstanding the present prospect of a permanent peace betwixt us and the Mahrattas, it seems highly expedient that there should always remain some strong barrier to…
That the said natives are Hindoos, and that their rights and privileges are grounded upon the possession of regular grants, a long series of family succession, and fair purchase.
That about the year 1770 the provinces of Bengal and Bahar were visited with a dreadful famine and mortality, by which at least one third of the inhabitants perished.
That the said commission, delegating to him, the said Warren Hastings, the whole functions of the Council, is destructive to the constitution thereof, and is contrary to the Company's standing orders, and is illegal.
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