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
In their fortune there has been some fluctuation. We are to see how
their minds have been affected with a change. Some impression it made on
them, undoubtedly. It produced some oblique notice of the submissions
that were made by suppliant nations. The utmost they did was to make
some of those cold, formal, general professions of a love of peace which
no power has ever refused to make, because they mean little and cost
nothing. The first paper I have seen (the publication at Hamburg) making
a show of that pacific disposition discovered a rooted animosity against
this nation, and an incurable rancor, even more than any one of their
hostile acts. In this Hamburg declaration they choose to suppose that
the war, on the part of England, _is a war of government, begun and
carried on against the sense and interests of the people_,--thus sowing
in their very overtures towards peace the seeds of tumult and sedition:
for they never have abandoned, and never will they abandon, in peace, in
war, in treaty, in any situation, or for one instant, their old, steady
maxim of separating the people from their government. Let me add, (and
it is with unfeigned anxiety for the character and credit of ministers
that I do add,) if our government perseveres in its as uniform course of
acting under instruments with such preambles, it pleads guilty to the
charges made by our enemies against it, both on its own part and on the
part of Parliament itself. The enemy must succeed in his plan for
loosening and disconnecting all the internal holdings of the kingdom.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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