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.
fellow-citizens may be under the dominion of no awe, but that of their
committee of research, and of their lanterne.
Having found the advantage of assassination in the formation of their
tyranny, it is the grand resource in which they trust for the support
of it. Whoever opposes any of their proceedings, or is suspected of a
design to oppose them, is to answer it with his life, or the lives of
his wife and children. This infamous, cruel, and cowardly practice of
assassination they have the imprudence to call MERCIFUL. They boast that
they operated their usurpation rather by terror than by force; and that
a few seasonable murders have prevented the bloodshed of many battles.
There is no doubt they will extend these acts of mercy whenever they
see an occasion. Dreadful, however, will be the consequences of their
attempt to avoid the evils of war by the merciful policy of murder. If,
by effectual punishment of the guilty, they do not wholly disavow that
practice, and the threat of it too, as any part of their policy; if ever
a foreign prince enters into France, he must enter it as into a country
of assassins. The mode of civilized war will not be practised; nor are
the French who act on the present system entitled to expect it. They,
whose known policy is to assassinate every citizen whom they suspect to
be discontented by their tyranny, and to corrupt the soldiery of every
open enemy, must look for no modified hostility. All war, which is not
battle, will be military execution. This will beget acts of retaliation
from you; and every retaliation will beget a new revenge. The
hell-hounds of war, on all sides, will be uncoupled and unmuzzled. The
new school of murder and barbarism, set up in Paris, having destroyed
(so far as in it lies) all the other manners and principles which have
hitherto civilized Europe, will destroy also the mode of civilized war,
which, more than anything else, has distinguished the Christian world.
Such is the approaching golden age, which the Virgil of your assembly
has sung to his Pollios! (Mirabeau's speech concerning universal peace.)
UNITY BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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