The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 02 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
Philosophy
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 02 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
By means of this part of the reform will fall the expensive office of
_surveyor-general,_ with all the influence that attends it. By this will
fall _two chief-justices in Eyre_, with all their train of dependants.
You need be under no apprehension, Sir, that your office is to be
touched in its emoluments. They are yours by law; and they are but a
moderate part of the compensation which is given to you for the ability
with which you execute an office of quite another sort of importance:
it is far from overpaying your diligence, or more than sufficient for
sustaining the high rank you stand in as the first gentleman of England.
As to the duties of your chief-justiceship, they are very different from
those for which you have received the office. Your dignity is too high
for a jurisdiction over wild beasts, and your learning and talents too
valuable to be wasted as chief-justice of a desert. I cannot reconcile
it to myself, that you, Sir, should be stuck up as a useless piece of
antiquity.
I have now disposed of the unprofitable landed estates of the crown, and
thrown them into the mass of private property; by which they will come,
through the course of circulation, and through the political secretions
of the state, into our better understood and better ordered revenues.
I come next to the great supreme body of the civil government itself. I
approach it with that awe and reverence with which a young physician
approaches to the cure of the disorders of his parent. Disorders, Sir,
and infirmities, there are,--such disorders, that all attempts towards
method, prudence, and frugality will be perfectly vain, whilst a system
of confusion remains, which is not only alien, but adverse to all
economy; a system which is not only prodigal in its very essence, but
causes everything else which belongs to it to be prodigally conducted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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