Edmund Burke on the character of politicians
We need them to be good
Generally considered the founder of modern Anglo-American conservatism, Edmund Burke was a more complicated thinker, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy remarking that he did not “bequeath a straightforward legacy to any political party or to any ideological brand of thought.” He famously favored prejudice or tradition as a guide to action, but also favored free trade, some degree of Catholic emancipation, and opposed slavery and most forms of capital punishment. He entered Parliament in 1765, at the age of 36, and stayed until 1794. Of his many books, the most influential was his Reflections on the Revolution in France. This is taken from his Thoughts on the Present Discontents.
The laws reach but a very little way. Constitute government how you please, infinitely the greater part of it must depend upon the exercise of the powers which are left at large to the prudence and uprightness of ministers of state. Even all the use and potency of the laws depends upon them.
Without them, your commonwealth is no better than a scheme upon paper; and not a living, active, effective constitution.
It is possible that through negligence, or ignorance, or design artfully conducted, ministers may suffer one part of government to languish, another to be perverted from its purposes, and every valuable interest of the country to fall into ruin and decay, without possibility of fixing any single act on which a criminal prosecution can be justly grounded. The due arrangement of men in the active part of the state, far from being foreign to the purposes of a wise government, ought to be among its very first and dearest objects.
When, therefore, the abettors of the new system tell us, that between them and their opposers there is nothing but a struggle for power, and that therefore we are no ways concerned in it; we must tell those who have the impudence to insult us in this manner, that, of all things, we ought to be the most concerned who and what sort of men they are that hold the trust of every thing that is dear to us.
Nothing can render this a point of indifference to the nation, hut what must either render us totally desperate, or soothe us into the security of idiots. We must soften into a credulity below the milkiness of infancy to think all men virtuous. We must be tainted with a malignity truly diabolical, to believe all the world to be equally wicked and corrupt.
Men are in publick life as in private, some good, some evil. The elevation of the one, and the depression ot the other, are the first objects of all true policy.
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