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Teachers' Resource Web Edmund Burke on Revolutions English and French Al Drake, UCI , WR139: Victorian Literature Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)--Edmund Burke (1729-97) Writing against the French Revolution of 1789 and for England's Century-Old "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, whereby Catholic-Leaning King James II was Forced to Abdicate His Throne in Favor of Protestants William and Mary from the Netherlands: England's Revolution of 1688 You will observe, that from Magna Charta [1] to the Declaration of Right [2], it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity . . . . We have an inheritable crown; an inheritable peerage; and an house of commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties, from a long line of ancestors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [T]he people of England well know, that the idea of inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission; without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free; but it secures what it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims, are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement; grasped as in a kind of mortmain[3] for ever. By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. Our political system is placed in just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts . . . . Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstitition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood, binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars. Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts, to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other . . . benefits, from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity . . . . [We] have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories . . . of our rights and privileges. (New York: Penguin, 19--. 119-121.) The French Revolution of 1789 You might, if you pleased, have profited of our example . . . . In your old states you possessed that variety of parts corresponding with the various descriptions of which your community was happily composed; you had all that combination, and all that opposition of interests, you had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe. These opposed and conflicting interests, which you considered as so great a blemish in your old and in our present constitution, impose a salutary check to all precipitate resolutions; They render deliberation a matter not of choice, but of necessity; they make all change a subject of compromise, which naturally begets moderation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . You had all these advantages in your antient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had every thing to begin anew. (121-122) [1] signed by King John in 1215 [2] revolutionary document by which William and Mary attained the British throne in 1688; subsequently codified in the Bill of Rights of 1688. [3] "mortmain" refers to permanent land holdings by the Church or other corporate body.
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