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.
I must fairly tell you, that so far as my principles are concerned,
(principles that I hope will only depart with my last breath), I have no
idea of a liberty unconnected with honesty and justice. Nor do I believe
that any good constitutions of government, or of freedom, can find
it necessary for their security to doom any part of the people to a
permanent slavery. Such a constitution of freedom, if such can be, is
in effect no more than another name for the tyranny of the strongest
faction; and factions in republics have been, and are, full as capable
as monarchs of the most cruel oppression and injustice. It is but
too true, that the love, and even the very idea of genuine liberty is
extremely rare. It is but too true, that there are many whose whole
scheme of freedom is made up of pride, perverseness, and insolence. They
feel themselves in a state of thraldom, they imagine that their souls
are cooped and cabined in, unless they have some man, or some body of
men, dependent on their mercy. The desire of having some one below them
descends to those who are the very lowest of all,--and a Protestant
cobbler, debased by his poverty, but exalted by his share of the ruling
church, feels a pride in knowing it is by his generosity alone that the
peer, whose footman's instep he measures, is able to keep his chaplain
from a gaol.
ENGLAND'S EMBASSY TO AMERICA.
They enter the capital of America only to abandon it; and these
assertors and representatives of the dignity of England, at the tail
of a flying army, let fly their Parthian shafts of memorials and
remonstrances at random behind them. Their promises and their offers,
their flatteries and their menaces, were all despised; and we were saved
from the disgrace of their formal reception, only because the congress
scorned to receive them; whilst the state-house of independent
Philadelphia opened her doors to the public entry of the ambassador of
France. From war and blood we went to submission; and from submission
plunged back again to war and blood; to desolate and be desolated,
without measure, hope, or end. I am a Royalist, I blushed for this
degradation of the crown. I am a Whig, I blushed for the dishonour of
parliament. I am a true Englishman, I felt to the quick for the disgrace
of England. I am a man, I felt for the melancholy reverse of human
affairs in the fall of the first power in the world.
HOWARD, THE PHILANTHROPIST.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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