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.
that this method of political computation would justify every extent
of crime. They would see, that on these principles, even where the very
worst acts were not perpetrated, it was owing rather to the fortune
of the conspirators, than to their parsimony in the expenditure of
treachery and blood. They would soon see, that criminal means once
tolerated are soon preferred. They present a shorter cut to the object
than through the highway of the moral virtues. Justifying perfidy and
murder for public benefit, public benefit would soon become the pretext,
and perfidy and murder the end; until rapacity, malice, revenge,
and fear more dreadful than revenge, could satiate their insatiable
appetites. Such must be the consequences of losing, in the splendour
of these triumphs of the rights of men, all natural sense of wrong and
right.
PARENTAL EXPERIENCE.
Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succession, I should
have been, according to my mediocrity, and the mediocrity of the age I
live in, a sort of founder of a family: I should have left a son, who,
in all the points in which personal merit can be viewed,--in science, in
erudition, in genius, in taste, in honour, in generosity, in humanity,
in every liberal sentiment, and every liberal accomplishment,--would not
have shown himself inferior to the duke of Bedford, or to any of those
whom he traces in his line. His grace very soon would have wanted all
plausibility in his attack upon that provision which belonged more
to mine than to me. He would soon have supplied every deficiency,
and symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have been for that
successor to resort to any stagnant wasting reservoir of merit in me, or
in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient, living spring of generous
and manly action. Every day he lived he would have re-purchased the
bounty of the Crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he had
received. He was made a public creature, and had no enjoyment whatever
but in the performance of some duty. At this exigent moment, the loss of
a finished man is not easily supplied.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account