A memoir of the political life of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke Volume 2; with extracts from his writings - Softcover

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1840 Excerpt: ...the duration of their legislatures, on the equally established ground, that all parliaments must have no other object in their continuance than public robbery, personal corruption, and everlasting despotism. They next prohibited the continuance of any member in the legislature for more than two years. They next prohibited the re-election of any member before an interval of two years. On those regulations, worthy of a gang of swindlers, and scarcely amounting to the " honour that exists among thieves," Burke pounces with indignant scorn. "If your representative," says he, " act improperly at the end of his two years' lease, it does not concern him for two years more. By the French Constitution, the best and wisest representatives go, equally with the worst, into this limbus patrum. Their bottoms are supposed frail, and they must go into dock to be refitted. Every man who has served in an Assembly is ineligible for two years after. Just as those magistrates begin to learn their trade, like chimney-sweepers, they are disqualified from exercising it. Superficial, new, petulant acquisition, and interrupted, dronish, broken recollection, is to be the defined character of all your future Governors. Your Constitution has too much of jealousy, to have much of sense in it. You consider the breach of trust in the representative so principally, that you do not at all regard the question of his fitness to execute it. The purgatory interval is not unfavourable to a faithless representative, who may be as good a canvasser as he was a bad Governor." One of the characteristics of the Revolution was the enormous issue of paper; an issue which is always the longing of Jacobinism in all countries, and of which the true interpretation is, the makin...