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
He augments the power of his enemy by the very means he must
take to contend with him. The country-gentleman, therefore, the officer
by sea and land, the man of liberal views and habits, attached to no
profession, will be as completely excluded from the government of his
country as if he were legislatively proscribed. It is obvious, that, in
the towns, all the things which conspire against the country-gentleman
combine in favor of the money manager and director. In towns combination
is natural. The habits of burghers, their occupations, their diversion,
their business, their idleness, continually bring them into mutual
contact. Their virtues and their vices are sociable; they are always in
garrison; and they come embodied and half-disciplined into the hands of
those who mean to form them for civil or military action.
All these considerations leave no doubt on my mind, that, if this
monster of a Constitution can continue, France will be wholly governed
by the agitators in corporations, by societies in the towns, formed of
directors in assignats, and trustees for the sale of Church lands,
attorneys, agents, money-jobbers, speculators, and adventurers,
composing an ignoble oligarchy, founded on the destruction of the crown,
the Church, the nobility, and the people. Here end all the deceitful
dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men. In "the Serbonian
bog" of this base oligarchy they are all absorbed, sunk, and lost
forever.
Though human eyes cannot trace them, one would be tempted to think some
great offences in France must cry to Heaven, which has thought fit to
punish it with a subjection to a vile and inglorious domination, in
which no comfort or compensation is to be found in any even of those
false splendors which, playing about other tyrannies, prevent mankind
from feeling themselves dishonored even whilst they are oppressed. I
must confess I am touched with a sorrow mixed with some indignation, at
the conduct of a few men, once of great rank, and still of great
character, who, deluded with specious names, have engaged in a business
too deep for the line of their understanding to fathom,--who have lent
their fair reputation and the authority of their high-sounding names to
the designs of men with whom they could not be acquainted, and have
thereby made their very virtues operate to the ruin of their country.
So far as to the first cementing principle.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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