The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 05 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
History
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 05 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
horizon,--and, like the horizon, it always flies before them. The
geometricians and the chemists bring, the one from the dry bones of
their diagrams, and the other from the soot of their furnaces,
dispositions that make them worse than indifferent about those feelings
and habitudes which are the supports of the moral world. Ambition is
come upon them suddenly; they are intoxicated with it, and it has
rendered them fearless of the danger which may from thence arise to
others or to themselves. These philosophers consider men in their
experiments no more than they do mice in an air-pump or in a recipient
of mephitic gas. Whatever his Grace may think of himself, they look upon
him, and everything that belongs to him, with no more regard than they
do upon the whiskers of that little long-tailed animal that has been
long the game of the grave, demure, insidious, spring-nailed,
velvet-pawed, green-eyed philosophers, whether going upon two legs or
upon four.
His Grace's landed possessions are irresistibly inviting to an agrarian
experiment. They are a downright insult upon the rights of man. They are
more extensive than the territory of many of the Grecian republics; and
they are without comparison more fertile than most of them. There are
now republics in Italy, in Germany, and in Switzerland, which do not
possess anything like so fair and ample a domain. There is scope for
seven philosophers to proceed in their analytical experiments upon
Harrington's seven different forms of republics, in the acres of this
one Duke. Hitherto they have been wholly unproductive to
speculation,--fitted for nothing but to fatten bullocks, and to produce
grain for beer, still more to stupefy the dull English understanding.
Abbé Sieyès has whole nests of pigeon-holes full of constitutions
ready-made, ticketed, sorted, and numbered, suited to every season and
every fancy: some with the top of the pattern at the bottom, and some
with the bottom at the top; some plain, some flowered; some
distinguished for their simplicity, others for their complexity; some of
blood color, some of _boue de Paris_; some with directories, others
without a direction; some with councils of elders and councils of
youngsters, some without any council at all; some where the electors
choose the representatives, others where the representatives choose the
electors; some in long coats, and some in short cloaks; some with
pantaloons, some without breeches; some with five-shilling
qualifications, some totally unqualified. So that no
constitution-fancier may go unsuited from his shop, provided he loves a
pattern of pillage, oppression, arbitrary imprisonment, confiscation,
exile, revolutionary judgment, and legalized premeditated murder, in any
shapes into which they can be put. What a pity it is that the progress
of experimental philosophy should be checked by his Grace's monopoly!
Such are their sentiments, I assure him; such is their language, when
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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