The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 04 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
Philosophy
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 04 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
It is a consideration of great moment, that you make the desired
admission without altering the system of your representation in the
smallest degree or in any part. You may leave that deliberation of a
Parliamentary change or reform, if ever you should think fit to engage
in it, uncomplicated and unembarrassed with the other question. Whereas,
if they are mixed and confounded, as some people attempt to mix and
confound them, no one can answer for the effects on the Constitution
itself.
There is another advantage in taking up this business singly and by an
arrangement for the single object. It is that you may proceed by
_degrees_. We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most
powerful law of Nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation. All
we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change
shall proceed by insensible degrees. This has all the benefits which may
be in change, without any of the inconveniences of mutation. Everything
is provided for as it arrives. This mode will, on the one hand, prevent
the _unfixing old interests at once_: a thing which is apt to breed a
black and sullen discontent in those who are at once dispossessed of all
their influence and consideration. This gradual course, on the other
side, will prevent men long under depression from being intoxicated with
a large draught of new power, which they always abuse with a licentious
insolence. But, wishing, as I do, the change to be gradual and cautious,
I would, in my first steps, lean rather to the side of enlargement than
restriction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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