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
With all these causes of corruption, we may well judge what the general
fashion of mind will be through both sexes and all conditions. Such
spectacles and such examples will overbear all the laws that ever
blackened the cumbrous volumes of our statutes. When royalty shall have
disavowed itself,--when it shall have relaxed all the principles of its
own support,--when it has rendered the system of Regicide fashionable,
and received it as triumphant, in the very persons who have consolidated
that system by the perpetration, of every crime, who have not only
massacred the prince, but the very laws and magistrates which were the
support of royalty, and slaughtered with an indiscriminate proscription,
without regard to either sex or age, every person that was suspected of
an inclination to king, law, or magistracy,--I say, will any one dare to
be loyal? Will any one presume, against both authority and opinion, to
hold up this unfashionable, antiquated, exploded Constitution?
The Jacobin faction in England must grow in strength and audacity; it
will be supported by other intrigues and supplied by other resources
than yet we have seen in action. Confounded at its growth, the
government may fly to Parliament for its support. But who will answer
for the temper of a House of Commons elected under these circumstances?
Who will answer for the courage of a House of Commons to arm the crown
with the extraordinary powers that it may demand? But the ministers will
not venture to ask half of what they know they want. They will lose half
of that half in the contest; and when they have obtained their nothing,
they will be driven by the cries of faction either to demolish the
feeble works they have thrown up in a hurry, or, in effect, to abandon
them. As to the House of Lords, it is not worth mentioning. The peers
ought naturally to be the pillars of the crown; but when their titles
are rendered contemptible, and their property invidious, and a part of
their weakness, and not of their strength, they will be found so many
degraded and trembling individuals, who will seek by evasion to put off
the evil day of their ruin. Both Houses will be in perpetual oscillation
between abortive attempts at energy and still more unsuccessful attempts
at compromise. You will be impatient of your disease, and abhorrent of
your remedy. A spirit of subterfuge and a tone of apology will enter
into all your proceedings, whether of law or legislation. Your judges,
who now sustain so masculine an authority, will appear more on their
trial than the culprits they have before them. The awful frown of
criminal justice will be smoothed into the silly smile of seduction.
Judges will think to insinuate and soothe the accused into conviction
and condemnation, and to wheedle to the gallows the most artful of all
delinquents. But they will not be so wheedled. They will not submit even
to the appearance of persons on their trial. Their claim to this
exemption will be admitted.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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