"Burke is one of those extraordinary contradictions which could only have been produced in England. He was an almost fanatical believer in justice and good government, and his sympathies went beyond his own country; they embraced humanity at large. But he was passionately attached to the order of things as then existing. He fondled error and fostered paradox until he came to be the defender of rotten boroughs and close corporations. His “Reflections on the French Revolution” had probably a greater influence on English history than any other pamphlet or piece of writing. They marked a turn in the tide; then came the September Massacres and the execution of the king. A cry of horror arose in England, and Burke's voice rose higher. “This,” men cried, “is the end of Reform! Are we, too, to drift to the same end—the same excesses?” The propertied classes, the Church, everyone who had anything to lose, declaimed against the Revolution, and the cause of Reform was postponed for forty years."
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Members of the Parliament of Great BritainPhilosophers from IrelandPoliticians from IrelandPeople from DublinAnglicans
Original Language: English
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Sources
Philip James Macdonell, ‘The Historic Basis of Liberalism’, in Essays in Liberalism by Six Oxford Men (1897), pp. 227–228
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke
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Edmund Burke
1729 – 1797
irischer Staatsmann und Philosoph
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