The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 06 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
Philosophy
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 06 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
I am now convinced that the Remarks of the last week of October cannot
come from the author to whom they are given, they are such a direct
contradiction to the style of manly indignation with which he spoke of
those miscreants and murderers in his excellent memorial to the States
of Holland,--to that very state which the author who presumes to
personate him does not find it contrary to the political interests of
England to leave in the hands of these very miscreants, against whom on
the part of England he took so much pains to animate their republic.
This cannot be; and if this argument wanted anything to give it new
force, it is strengthened by an additional reason, that is irresistible.
Knowing that noble person, as well as myself, to be under very great
obligations to the crown, I am confident he would not so very directly
contradict, even in the paroxysm of his zeal against monarchy, the
declarations made in the name and with the fullest approbation of our
sovereign, his master, and our common benefactor. In those declarations
you will see that the king, instead of being sensible of greater alarm
and jealousy from a neighboring crowned head than from, these regicides,
attributes all the dangers of Europe to the latter. Let this writer hear
the description given in the royal declaration of the scheme of power of
these miscreants, as "_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_." After thus describing, with an eloquence and energy equalled
only by its truth, the means by which this usurped power had been
acquired and maintained, that government is characterized with equal
force. His Majesty, far from thinking monarchy in France to be a greater
object of jealousy than the Regicide usurpation, calls upon the French
to reestablish "_a monarchical government_" for the purpose of shaking
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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