Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution in basing their case for liberty on abstract ideals such as "the rights of man." Instead, he explained how liberty was better protected with a constitu- tion grounded on inherited cultural and political institutions. Using abstract ideas to overrule cus- tom and tradition pushed the revolutionaries, he said, toward corruption and dictatorship. Critics of Burke, defenders of Enlightenment thinking such as Thomas Paine (The Rights of Man) and Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Women), rejected his arguments, though it was not long before the violence unleashed by the Jacobins and the tyranny imposed by Napoleon seemed to vindicate Burke's position. ritish parliamentarian Edmund Burke (1729- 1797) has been called "the father of conser- Dvatism," a reputation that came mostly from his denunciation of the excesses of the French Revolution in a letter hewrote to a French aristocrat, published as Essays on the French Revolution. In fact, Burke's politics were generally liberal: he upheld the rights of Parliament and limitations on those of the king; supported the American Revolution, Catholic rights in his native Ireland, and the aboli- tion of the slave trade; and spoke strongly against the corruption of the British East India Company (see Chapter 20). In the Essays-written in 1790 before the execution of Louis XVI, the bloodshed of the Reign of Terror, and the dictatorship of the Jacobins- Burke argued that the French had been mistaken Source: Edmund Burke, Works (London: 1867). From Essays on the French Revolution The question of dethroning [a king] will al- ways be, as it has always been, an extraordi- nary question of state.... As it was not made for common abuses, so it is not to be agitated by common minds. The speculative line of demarcation, where obedience ought to end, and resistance must begin, is faint, obscure, and not easily definable. It is not a single act, or a single event, which determines it. Governments must be abused and deranged indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experlence of the past. ... The wise will de- termine from the gravity of the case... but, with or without right, a revolution will be the very last resource of the thinking and the good.... The [British] parliament says to the king, "Your subjects have inherited this freedom," claiming thetr franchises not on abstract prin- ciples "as the rights of men," but as the rights of Englishmen, and as a patrimony derived from their forefathers. You will observe that from Magna Carta [onward] it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our libertles as an entailed inheri- tance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity... with- out any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right.... Thus... in what we improve, we are never wholly new; in what we retain, we are never wholly obsolete.... You [in France] chose to act as if you... had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you.... Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves. You would not have cho- sen to consider the French as a...nation of low-born servile wretches until the emancl- pating year of 1789.... You would not have been content to be... a gang of Maroon slaves, suddenly broke loose from the house of bondage, and therefore to be pardoned for your abuse of the liberty to which you were not accustomed.... Compute your gains: see what is got by those extravagant and presumptuous specu- lations which have taught your leaders to despise all their predecessors, and all their contemporarles, and even to despise them- selves, until the moment in which they be- came truly desplcable.... France, when she let loose the reins of regal authority, doubled the license of a ferocdous dissoluteness in man- ners, and of an insolent irreligion in opinions and practices; and has extended through all ranks of life, as if she were communicating some privilege, or laying open some secluded benefit, all the unhappy corruptions that usu- ally were the disease of wealth and power. This is one of the new principles of equality in France.... Remember that your parlament of Parts told your king, that, in calling the states to- gether, he had nothing to fear.... It is right that these men should [now] hide their heads. ... They have seen the French rebel agalnst a mild and lawful monarch, with more fury, outrage, and insult, than ever any people has been known to rise agalnst the most illegal usurper, or the most [bloody] tyrant. Their resistance was made to conces- slon; their revolt was from protection; their blow was almed at a hand holding out graces, favors, and immunities.... They have found their punishment in their success. Laws overturned; tribunals sub- verted; industry without vigor; commerce explring, the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished; a church pillaged, and a state not relieved; cvil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom; everything consequence. ... The principle of property, whose creatures and representatives they are, was systematically subverted... After I have read over the list of the per- sons and descriptions elected into the Third Estate, nothing which they afterwards did could appear astonishing. Among them, in- deed, I saw some of known rank; some of shin- ing talents; but of any practical experience in the state, not one man was to be found. The best were only men of theory... . Nothing can secure a steady and moder ate conduct in such assemblies, but that the body of them should be respectably composed, in point of condition in life, of permanent property, of education, and of such habits as enlarge and liberalize the understanding.... Judge, Sir, of my surprise, when I found that a very great proportion of the assembly (a majority, I belleve) was composed of prac- titioners in the law. It was composed, not of distinguished magistrates.. . but ... of obscure provinclal advocates... the foment- ers and conductors of the petty war of vil- lage vexation.... To these were joined men of other descriptions, from whom as little knowledge of, or attention to, the interests of a great state was to be expected, and as little regard to the stability of any institution; men formed to be instruments, not controls. Such in general was the composition of the Third Estate in the National Assembly; in which was scarcely to be percelved the slightest traces of human and divine sacrificed to the Idol of what we call the natural landed interest of the public credit, and national bankruptcy the country.