The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV | Page 6

lightly. To what a
state of savage, stupid, servile insensibility must your people be
reduced, who can endure such proceedings in their Church, their state,
and their judicature, even for a moment! But the deluded people of
France are like other madmen, who, to a miracle, bear hunger, and
thirst, and cold, and confinement, and the chains and lash of their
keeper, whilst all the while they support themselves by the imagination
that they are generals of armies, prophets, kings, and emperors. As to a
change of mind in those men, who consider infamy as honor,
degradation as preferment, bondage to low tyrants as liberty, and the
practical scorn and contumely of their upstart masters as marks of
respect and homage, I look upon it as absolutely impracticable. These
madmen, to be cured, must first, like other madmen, be subdued. The
sound part of the community, which I believe to be large, but by no
means the largest part, has been taken by surprise, and is disjointed,
terrified, and disarmed. That sound part of the community must first be
put into a better condition, before it can do anything in the way of
deliberation or persuasion. This must be an act of power, as well as of
wisdom: of power in the hands of firm, determined patriots, who can
distinguish the misled from traitors, who will regulate the state (if such

should be their fortune) with a discriminating, manly, and provident
mercy; men who are purged of the surfeit and indigestion of systems, if
ever they have been admitted into the habit of their minds; men who
will lay the foundation of a real reform in effacing every vestige of that
philosophy which pretends to have made discoveries in the Terra
Australia of morality; men who will fix the state upon these bases of
morals and politics, which are our old and immemorial, and, I hope,
will be our eternal possession.
This power, to such men, must come from without. It may be given to
you in pity: for surely no nation ever called so pathetically on the
compassion of all its neighbors. It may be given by those neighbors on
motives of safety to themselves. Never shall I think any country in
Europe to be secure, whilst there is established in the very centre of it a
state (if so it may be called) founded on principles of anarchy, and
which is in reality a college of armed fanatics, for the propagation of
the principles of assassination, robbery, rebellion, fraud, faction,
oppression, and impiety. Mahomet, hid, as for a time he was, in the
bottom of the sands of Arabia, had his spirit and character been
discovered, would have been an object of precaution to provident
minds. What if he had erected his fanatic standard for the destruction of
the Christian religion _in luce Asiæ_, in the midst of the then noonday
splendor of the then civilized world? The princes of Europe, in the
beginning of this century, did well not to suffer the monarchy of France
to swallow up the others. They ought not now, in my opinion, to suffer
all the monarchies and commonwealths to be swallowed up in the gulf
of this polluted anarchy. They may be tolerably safe at present, because
the comparative power of France for the present is little. But times and
occasions make dangers. Intestine troubles may arise in other countries.
There is a power always on the watch, qualified and disposed to profit
of every conjuncture, to establish its own principles and modes of
mischief, wherever it can hope for success. What mercy would these
usurpers have on other sovereigns, and on other nations, when they
treat their own king with such unparalleled indignities, and so cruelly
oppress their own countrymen?
The king of Prussia, in concurrence with us, nobly interfered to save
Holland from confusion. The same power, joined with the rescued
Holland and with Great Britain, has put the Emperor in the possession

of the Netherlands, and secured, under that prince, from all arbitrary
innovation, the ancient, hereditary Constitution of those provinces. The
chamber of Wetzlar has restored the Bishop of Liege, unjustly
dispossessed by the rebellion of his subjects. The king of Prussia was
bound by no treaty nor alliance of blood, nor had any particular reasons
for thinking the Emperor's government would be more mischievous or
more oppressive to human nature than that of the Turk; yet, on mere
motives of policy, that prince has interposed, with the threat of all his
force, to snatch even the Turk from the pounces of the Imperial eagle.
If this is done in favor of a barbarous nation, with a barbarous neglect
of police, fatal to the human race,--in favor of a nation by principle in
eternal enmity with the Christian name,