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
with their bloody hands in the bowels of those who came from their own.
To all this let us join the practice of _cannibalism_, with which, in
the proper terms, and with the greatest truth, their several factions
accuse each other. By cannibalism I mean their devouring, as a nutriment
of their ferocity, some part of the bodies of those they have murdered,
their drinking the blood of their victims, and forcing the victims
themselves to drink the blood of their kindred slaughtered before their
faces. By cannibalism I mean also to signify all their nameless,
unmanly, and abominable insults on the bodies of those they slaughter.
As to those whom they suffer to die a natural death, they do not permit
them to enjoy the last consolations of mankind, or those rights of
sepulture which indicate hope, and which mere Nature has taught to
mankind, in all countries, to soothe the afflictions and to cover the
infirmity of mortal condition. They disgrace men in the entry into life,
they vitiate and enslave them through the whole course of it, and they
deprive them of all comfort at the conclusion of their dishonored and
depraved existence. Endeavoring to persuade the people that they are no
better than beasts, the whole body of their institution tends to make
them beasts of prey, furious and savage. For this purpose the active
part of them is disciplined into a ferocity which has no parallel. To
this ferocity there is joined not one of the rude, unfashioned virtues
which accompany the vices, where the whole are left to grow up together
in the rankness of uncultivated Nature. But nothing is left to Nature in
their systems.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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