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.
be confounding, that is a marked distinction between change and
reformation. The former alters the substance of the objects themselves,
and gets rid of all their essential good, as well as of all the
accidental evil, annexed to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is
to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it
may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired,
cannot be certainly known beforehand. Reform is not a change in the
substance, or in the primary modification of the object, but a direct
application of a remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that
is removed, all is sure. It stops there; and if it fails, the substance
which underwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was.
All this, in effect, I think, but am not sure, I have said elsewhere. It
cannot at this time be too often repeated; line upon line; precept upon
precept; until it comes into the currency of a proverb, TO INNOVATE IS
NOT TO REFORM. The French revolutionists complained of everything; they
refused to reform anything; and they left nothing, no, nothing at all,
UNCHANGED. The consequences are BEFORE us,--not in remote history; not
in future prognostication: they are about us; they are upon us. They
shake the public security; they menace private enjoyment. They dwarf the
growth of the young; they break the quiet of the old. If we travel, they
stop our way. They infest us in town; they pursue us to the country.
Our business is interrupted; our repose is troubled; our pleasures are
saddened; our very studies are poisoned and perverted, and knowledge
is rendered worse than ignorance by the enormous evils of this dreadful
innovation. The revolution harpies of France, sprung from night and
hell, or from that chaotic anarchy which generates equivocally "all
monstrous, all prodigious things," cuckoo-like, adulterously lay their
eggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the nest of every neighbouring
state. These obscene harpies, who deck themselves in I know not what
divine attributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds of
prey (both mothers and daughters), flutter over our heads, and souse
down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, or
unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal.
PHILOSOPHICAL VANITY; ITS MAXIMS, AND EFFECTS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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