The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 03 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
History
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 03 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
After all, if the House of Commons were to have an wholly professional
and faculty composition, what is the power of the House of Commons,
circumscribed and shut in by the immovable barriers of laws, usages,
positive rules of doctrine and practice, counterpoised by the House of
Lords, and every moment of its existence at the discretion of the crown
to continue, prorogue, or dissolve us? The power of the House of
Commons, direct or indirect, is, indeed, great: and long may it be able
to preserve its greatness, and the spirit belonging to true greatness,
at the full!--and it will do so, as long as it can keep the breakers of
law in India from becoming the makers of law for England. The power,
however, of the House of Commons, when least diminished, is as a drop of
water in the ocean, compared to that residing in a settled majority of
your National Assembly. That assembly, since the destruction of the
orders, has no fundamental law, no strict convention, no respected usage
to restrain it. Instead of finding themselves obliged to conform to a
fixed constitution, they have a power to make a constitution which shall
conform to their designs. Nothing in heaven or upon earth can serve as a
control on them. What ought to be the heads, the hearts, the
dispositions, that are qualified, or that dare, not only to make laws
under a fixed constitution, but at one heat to strike out a totally new
constitution for a great kingdom, and in every part of it, from the
monarch on the throne to the vestry of a parish? But
"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."
In such a state of unbounded power, for undefined and undefinable
purposes, the evil of a moral and almost physical inaptitude of the man
to the function must be the greatest we can conceive to happen in the
management of human affairs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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