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.
Lord Keppel had two countries; one of descent, and one of birth. Their
interest and their glory are the same; and his mind was capacious of
both. His family was noble, and it was Dutch: that is, he was the oldest
and purest nobility that Europe can boast, among a people renowned above
all others for love of their native land. Though it was never shown in
insult to any human being, Lord Keppel was something high. It was a wild
stock of pride, on which the tenderest of all hearts had grafted the
milder virtues. He valued ancient nobility; and he was not disinclined
to augment it with new honours. He valued the old nobility and the new,
not as an excuse for inglorious sloth, but as an incitement to virtuous
activity. He considered it as a sort of cure for selfishness and a
narrow mind; conceiving that a man born in an elevated place in himself
was nothing, but everything in what went before, and what was to
come after him. Without much speculation, but by the sure instinct
of ingenuous feelings, and by the dictates of plain, unsophisticated,
natural understanding, he felt that no great commonwealth could by
any possibility long subsist without a body of some kind or other
of nobility, decorated with honour, and fortified by privilege. This
nobility forms the chain that connects the ages of a nation, which
otherwise (with Mr. Paine) would soon be taught that no one generation
can bind another. He felt that no political fabric could be well made
without some such order of things as might, through a series of time,
afford a rational hope of securing unity, coherence, consistency, and
stability to the state. He felt that nothing else can protect it against
the levity of courts, and the greater levity of the multitude. That
to talk of hereditary monarchy, without anything else of hereditary
reverence in the commonwealth, was a low-minded absurdity, fit only for
those detestable "fools aspiring to be knaves," who began to forge in
1789 the false money of the French constitution.--That it is one fatal
objection to all NEW fancied and NEW FABRICATED republics (among
a people who, once possessing such an advantage, have wickedly and
insolently rejected it), that the PREJUDICE of an old nobility is a
thing that CANNOT be made. It may be improved, it may be corrected, it
may be replenished: men may be taken from it or aggregated to it, but
the THING ITSELF is matter of INVETERATE opinion, and therefore CANNOT
be matter of mere positive institution. He felt that this nobility in
fact does not exist in wrong of other orders of the state, but by them,
and for them.
"LABOURING POOR."
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