Thoughts on the Present Discontents, and SpeechesBurke, Edmund
General
Thoughts on the Present Discontents, and Speeches
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1789
a struggle for power, and that therefore we are no-ways concerned in it;
we must tell those who have the impudence to insult us in this manner,
that, of all things, we ought to be the most concerned, who and what sort
of men they are, that hold the trust of everything that is dear to us.
Nothing can render this a point of indifference to the nation, but what
must either render us totally desperate, or soothe us into the security
of idiots. We must soften into a credulity below the milkiness of
infancy, to think all men virtuous. We must be tainted with a malignity
truly diabolical, to believe all the world to be equally wicked and
corrupt. Men are in public life as in private--some good, some evil. The
elevation of the one, and the depression of the other, are the first
objects of all true policy. But that form of Government, which, neither
in its direct institutions, nor in their immediate tendency, has
contrived to throw its affairs into the most trustworthy hands, but has
left its whole executory system to be disposed of agreeably to the
uncontrolled pleasure of any one man, however excellent or virtuous, is a
plan of polity defective not only in that member, but consequentially
erroneous in every part of it.
In arbitrary Governments, the constitution of the Ministry follows the
constitution of the Legislature. Both the Law and the Magistrate are the
creatures of Will. It must be so. Nothing, indeed, will appear more
certain, on any tolerable consideration of this matter, than that _every
sort of Government ought to have its Administration correspondent to its
Legislature_. If it should be otherwise, things must fall into a hideous
disorder. The people of a free Commonwealth, who have taken such care
that their laws should be the result of general consent, cannot be so
senseless as to suffer their executory system to be composed of persons
on whom they have no dependence, and whom no proofs of the public love
and confidence have recommended to those powers, upon the use of which
the very being of the State depends.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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