Burke writes, namely, that the people must be hood-winked, and held in superstitious ignorance by some bugbear or other; and what is called the crown answers this purpose, and therefore it answers all the purposes to be expected from it.
Thomas Paine: “Burke writes, namely, that the people must be hood-winked, and held in superstitious ignorance by some bugbear or other…”
Editor's note · Context
Paine critiques the British ministry's strategy of keeping the populace ignorant through the symbol of the crown.
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Burke's Book is easily accounted for.--When a man in a wrong cause attempts to steer his course by anything else than some polar truth or principle, he is sure to be lost.
He must now show that every one in the line of hereditary succession was a Solomon, or his title is not good to be a king.
The man who is in the receipt of a million a year is the last person to promote a spirit of reform, lest, in the event, it should reach to himself.
It was a sort of new form of government that insensibly served to put the old one out of sight and to unhinge it from the superstitious authority of antiquity.