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.
Passing from the civil creating and the civil cementing principles of this Constitution to the National Assembly, which is to appear and act as sovereign, we see a body in its constitution with every possible power and no possible external…
In that general territory itself, as in the old name of Provinces, the citizens are interested from old prejudices and unreasoned habits, and not on account of the geometric properties of its figure.
Perhaps it is a sort of elemental training to those higher and more large regards by which alone men come to be affected, as with their own concern, in the prosperity of a kingdom so extensive as that of France.
Such divisions of our country as have been formed by habit, and not by a sudden jerk of authority, were so many little images of the great country, in which the heart found something which it could fill.
But, instead of being all Frenchmen, the greater likelihood is that the inhabitants of that region will shortly have no country.
To a person who takes a view of the whole, the strength of Paris, thus formed, will appear a system of general weakness.
Paris is compact; she has an enormous strength, wholly disproportioned to the force of any of the square republics; and this strength is collected and condensed within a narrow compass.
It is through the power of Paris, now become the centre and focus of jobbing, that the leaders of this faction direct, or rather command, the whole legislative and the whole executive government.
Here end all the deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men.
Their virtues and their vices are sociable; they are always in garrison; and they come embodied and half-disciplined into the hands of those who mean to form them for civil or military action.
It is obvious, that, in the towns, all the things which conspire against the country-gentleman combine in favor of the money manager and director.
The country-gentleman, therefore, the officer by sea and land, the man of liberal views and habits, attached to no profession, will be as completely excluded from the government of his country as if he were legislatively proscribed.
He augments the power of his enemy by the very means he must take to contend with him.
Hope, fear, alarm, jealousy, the ephemerous tale that does its business and dies in a day, all these things, which are the reins and spurs by which leaders check or urge the minds of followers, are not easily employed, or hardly at all…
Combine them by all the art you can, and all the industry, they are always dissolving into individuality.
The very nature of a country life, the very nature of landed property, in all the occupations and all the pleasures they afford, render combination and arrangement (the sole way of procuring and exerting influence) in a manner impossible…
The landed gentleman, the yeoman, and the peasant have, none of them, habits or inclinations or experience which can lead them to any share in this the sole source of power and influence now left in France.
The whole of the power obtained by this Revolution will settle in the towns among the burghers, and the moneyed directors who lead them.
Those whose operations can take from or add ten per cent to the possessions of every man in France must be the masters of every man in France.
The many must be the dupes of the few who conduct the machine of these speculations.
The truly melancholy part of the policy of systematically making a nation of gamesters is this,--that, though all are forced to play, few can understand the game, and fewer still are in a condition to avail themselves of that knowledge.
If you abstract it from its uses in gaming, to accumulate your paper wealth would be, not the providence of a man, but the distempered instinct of a jackdaw.
Politicians like Edmund Burke
