Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund BurkeBurke, Edmund
Philosophy
Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke
Burke, Edmund
Burke, Edmund, 1729-1797; Essays; Political science; Speeches, addresses, etc.
reckoning the reservoirs, and they amount to upwards of eleven hundred,
from the extent of two or three acres to five miles in circuit. From
these reservoirs currents are occasionally drawn over the fields, and
these watercourses again call for a considerable expense to keep them
properly scoured and duly leveled. Taking the district in that map as
a measure, there cannot be in the Carnatic and Tanjore fewer than ten
thousand of these reservoirs of the larger and middling dimensions, to
say nothing of those for domestic services, and the uses of religious
purification. These are not the enterprises of your power, nor in a
style of magnificence suited to the taste of your minister. These are
the monuments of real kings, who were the fathers of their people;
testators to a posterity which they embraced as their own. These were
the grand sepulchres built by ambition; but by the ambition of an
insatiable benevolence, which, not contented with reigning in the
dispensation of happiness during the contracted term of human life, had
strained, with all the reachings and graspings of a vivacious mind, to
extend the dominion of their bounty beyond the limits of nature, and to
perpetuate themselves through generations of generations, the guardians,
the protectors, the nourishers of mankind.
ABSTRACT THEORY OF HUMAN LIBERTY.
I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman of
that society, be he who he will: and perhaps I have given as good proofs
of my attachment to that cause in the whole course of my public conduct.
I think I envy liberty as little as they do, to any other nation. But I
cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates
to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as
it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude
of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen
pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its
distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstances are
what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to
mankind. Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good;
yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France on
her enjoyment of a government (for she then had a government)
without inquiry what the nature of that government was, or how it was
administered? Can I now congratulate the same nation upon its freedom?
Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the
blessings of mankind that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who
has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his
cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to
congratulate a highwayman and murderer, who has broken prison, upon
the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again
the scene of the criminals condemned to the galleys, and their heroic
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