They who carried on this system looked to the irresistible force of Great Britain for their support in their acts of power.
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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When we cannot give the benefit as we would wish, let us not refuse it altogether.
This disposition is the true source of the passion which many men in very humble life have taken to the American war.
The whole is delusion, from one end to the other.
There is a law of neighborhood which does not leave a man perfect master on his own ground.
It is the genuine produce of the ancient, rustic, manly, home-bred sense of this country.
Those which are rather conclusions of legal reason than matters of statutable provision belong to universal equity, and are universally applicable.
It has ever been the method of public jurists to draw a great part of the analogies on which they form the law of nations from the principles of law which prevail in civil community.
Its foundation is laid in Regicide, in Jacobinism, and in Atheism; and it has joined to those principles a body of systematic manners which secures their operation.
Above all things, I was resolved not to be guilty of tampering,--the odious vice of restless and unstable minds.
All the relations of life are at once dissolved.
Instead of the religion and the law by which they were in a great politic communion with the Christian world, they have constructed their republic on three bases, all fundamentally opposite to those on which the communities of Europe are…
On this head the parent law is express and clear, and has made many wise provisions, which, without destroying, regulate and restrain the right of ownership by the right of vicinage.
When a man is robbed of a trifle on the highway, it is not the twopence lost that constitutes the capital outrage.
Such another example of boldness and contrivance I believe the world cannot furnish.
So, after some time, and after one of the most rigid conquests that we read of in history, the Normans softened into the English.
God forbid that prudence, the first of all the virtues, as well as the supreme director of them all, should ever be employed in the service of any of the vices!
I say, that, if the crown could be responsible, his Majesty,--but certainly the ministers, and even these law officers themselves, through whose hands the acts pass biennially in Ireland, or annually in the colonies, are in an habitual…
He claims glory and renown from that by which every other person since the beginning of time has been dishonored and disgraced.
It is putting things into the position of an ugly alternative, into which I hope in God they never will be put.
The tenderness of the executive power is the natural asylum of those upon whom the laws have declared war; and to complain that men are inclined to favor the means of their own safety is so absurd, that one forgets the injustice in the…
The people heard, indeed, from the beginning of these disputes, one thing continually dinned in their ears: that reason and justice demanded, that the Americans, who paid no taxes, should be compelled to contribute.
He treats the official and regular Directors with just contempt, as a parcel of mean, mechanical book-keepers.
My Lords, I will venture to say, there is no man but owes something to his character.
A man is certainly the most perfect Protestant who protests against the whole Christian religion.
Politicians like Edmund Burke
