The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. | Page 9

be
feared that we shall perpetually relapse, whilst the real productive cause
of all this superstitious folly, enthusiastical nonsense, and holy tyranny,
holds a reverend place in the estimation even of those who are
otherwise enlightened.
Civil government borrows a strength from ecclesiastical; and artificial
laws receive a sanction from artificial revelations. The ideas of religion
and government are closely connected; and whilst we receive
government as a thing necessary, or even useful to our well-being, we
shall in spite of us draw in, as a necessary, though undesirable
consequence, an artificial religion of some kind or other. To this the
vulgar will always be voluntary slaves; and even those of a rank of
understanding superior, will now and then involuntarily feel its

influence. It is therefore of the deepest concernment to us to be set right
in this point; and to be well satisfied whether civil government be such
a protector from natural evils, and such a nurse and increaser of
blessings, as those of warm imaginations promise. In such a discussion,
far am I from proposing in the least to reflect on our most wise form of
government; no more than I would, in the freer parts of my
philosophical writings, mean to object to the piety, truth, and perfection
of our most excellent Church. Both, I am sensible, have their
foundations on a rock. No discovery of truth can prejudice them. On
the contrary, the more closely the origin of religion and government is
examined, the more clearly their excellences must appear. They come
purified from the fire. My business is not with them. Having entered a
protest against all objections from these quarters, I may the more freely
inquire, from history and experience, how far policy has contributed in
all times to alleviate those evils which Providence, that perhaps has
designed us for a state of imperfection, has imposed; how far our
physical skill has cured our constitutional disorders; and whether it may
not have introduced new ones, curable perhaps by no skill.
In looking over any state to form a judgment on it, it presents itself in
two lights; the external, and the internal. The first, that relation which it
bears in point of friendship or enmity to other states. The second, that
relation which its component parts, the governing and the governed,
bear to each other. The first part of the external view of all states, their
relation as friends, makes so trifling a figure in history, that I am very
sorry to say, it affords me but little matter on which to expatiate. The
good offices done by one nation to its neighbor;[8] the support given in
public distress; the relief afforded in general calamity; the protection
granted in emergent danger; the mutual return of kindness and civility,
would afford a very ample and very pleasing subject for history. But,
alas! all the history of all times, concerning all nations, does not afford
matter enough to fill ten pages, though it should be spun out by the
wire-drawing amplification of a Guicciardini himself. The glaring side
is that of enmity. War is the matter which fills all history, and
consequently the only or almost the only view in which we can see the
external of political society is in a hostile shape; and the only actions to
which we have always seen, and still see all of them intent, are such as
tend to the destruction of one another. "War," says Machiavel, "ought

to be the only study of a prince"; and by a prince, he means every sort
of state, however constituted. "He ought," says this great political
doctor, "to consider peace only as a breathing-time, which gives him
leisure to contrive, and furnishes ability to execute military plans." A
meditation on the conduct of political societies made old Hobbes
imagine, that war was the state of nature; and truly, if a man judged of
the individuals of our race by their conduct when united and packed
into nations and kingdoms, he might imagine that every sort of virtue
was unnatural and foreign to the mind of man.
The first accounts we have of mankind are but so many accounts of
their butcheries. All empires have been cemented in blood; and, in
those early periods, when the race of mankind began first to form
themselves into parties and combinations, the first effect of the
combination, and indeed the end for which it seems purposely formed,
and best calculated, was their mutual destruction. All ancient history is
dark and uncertain. One thing, however, is clear,--there were
conquerors, and conquests in those days; and, consequently, all that
devastation by which they are formed, and all that oppression by which
they are maintained. We know little of Sesostris, but that he led out of
Egypt an army