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
[27] "In their place has succeeded a system destructive of all public
order, maintained by proscriptions, exiles, and confiscations without
number,--by arbitrary imprisonments,--by massacres which cannot be
remembered without horror,--and at length by the execrable murder of a
just and beneficent sovereign, and of the illustrious princess, who
with, an unshaken firmness has shared all the misfortunes of her royal
consort, his protracted sufferings, his cruel captivity, his ignominious
death."--"They [the Allies] have had to encounter acts of aggression
without pretext, open violations of all treaties, unprovoked
declarations of war,--in a word, whatever corruption, intrigue, or
violence could effect, for the purpose, so openly avowed, of subverting
all the institutions of society, and of extending' over all the nations
of Europe that confusion which has produced the misery of France. This
state of things cannot exist in France, without involving all the
surrounding powers in one common danger,--without giving them the right,
without imposing it upon them as a duty, to stop the progress of an evil
which exists only by the successive violation of all law and all
property, and which attacks the Fundamental principles by which mankind
is united in the bonds of civil society."--"The king would propose none
other than equitable and moderate conditions: not such as the expenses,
the risks, and the sacrifices of the war might justify, but such as his
Majesty thinks himself under the indispensable necessity of requiring,
with a view to these considerations, and still more to that of his own
security and of the future tranquillity of Europe. His Majesty desires
nothing more sincerely than thus to terminate a war which he in vain
endeavored to avoid, and all the calamities of which, as now experienced
by France, are to be attributed only to the ambition, the perfidy, and
the violence of those whose crimes have involved their own country in
misery and disgraced all civilized nations."--"The king promises on his
part the suspension of hostilities, friendship, and (as far as the
course of events will allow, of which the will of man cannot dispose)
security and protection to all those who, by declaring for a monarchical
government, shall shake off the yoke of a sanguinary anarchy: of that
anarchy which, has broken all the most sacred bonds of society,
dissolved all the relations of civil life, violated every right,
confounded every duty; which uses the name of liberty to exercise the
most cruel tyranny, to annihilate all property, to seize on all
possessions; which founds its power on the pretended consent of the
people, and itself carries fire and sword through extensive provinces
for having demanded their laws, their religion, and their _lawful
sovereign_."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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