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.
When they had done this, they instantly, and with the most atrocious
perfidy and breach of all faith among men, laid the axe to the root
of all property, and consequently of all national prosperity, by the
principles they established, and the example they set, in confiscating
all the possessions of the church. They made and recorded a sort of
INSTITUTE and DIGEST of anarchy, called the rights of man, in such a
pedantic abuse of elementary principles as would have disgraced boys
at school; but this declaration of rights was worse than trifling and
pedantic in them, as by their name and authority they systematically
destroyed every hold of authority by opinion, religious or civil, on the
minds of the people. By this mad declaration they subverted the state,
and brought on such calamities as no country, without a long war, has
ever been known to suffer; and which may in the end produce such a war,
and perhaps many such.
With them the question was not between despotism and liberty. The
sacrifice they made of the peace and power of their country was not made
on the altar of freedom. Freedom, and a better security for freedom than
that they have taken, they might have had without any sacrifice at all.
They brought themselves into all the calamities they suffer, not that
through them they might obtain a British constitution; they plunged
themselves headlong into those calamities to prevent themselves from
settling into that constitution, or into anything resembling it.
CONFIDENCE AND JEALOUSY.
Confidence might become a vice, and jealousy a virtue, according to
circumstances. That confidence, of all public virtues, was the most
dangerous, and jealousy in a house of commons, of all public vices, the
most tolerable; especially where the number and the charge of standing
armies in time of peace was the question.
ECONOMY OF INJUSTICE.
Strange as this scheme of conduct in ministry is, and inconsistent with
all just policy, it is still true to itself, and faithful to its own
perverted order. Those who are bountiful to crimes, will be rigid to
merit, and penurious to service. Their penury is even held out as a
blind and cover to their prodigality. The economy of injustice is, to
furnish resources for the fund of corruption. Then they pay off their
protection to great crimes and great criminals by being inexorable to
the paltry frailties of little men; and these modern flagellants
are sure, with a rigid fidelity, to whip their own enormities on the
vicarious back of every small offender.
SUBSISTENCE AND REVENUE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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