Edmund Burke, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The spirit of conquest is not, at its root, a military phenomenon. An army may be its instrument, but the spirit itself is something older and more corrosive: it is the disposition to treat the people over whom power is exercised as material to be managed rather than as beings whose habits, affections, and inherited arrangements have a claim upon the conscience of those who govern them.
Consider what happens when that spirit prevails. Power survives the destruction of the manners and opinions that once gave it legitimacy — but it survives in a degraded form, compelled to hold itself by arts similar to those by which it seized authority in the first place.1 The old fealty — that spirit of honour which freed kings from fear and therefore freed both kings and subjects from the mutual precautions of tyranny — is replaced by preventive murder and preventive confiscation, by the long roll of grim and bloody maxims that constitute the political code of every power that does not stand upon its own honour.1
Kings become tyrants from policy when subjects are made rebels from principle; and that vicious circle is precisely what the spirit of conquest, once it has destroyed the ancient institutions, cannot escape.2 The spirit of conquest operates, then, wherever power subverts rather than inherits — wherever it pulls down the accumulated arrangements of civil life and substitutes its own will.
This is why I applied the same diagnostic to the Penal Laws in Ireland, to the East India Company in Bengal, and to the National Assembly in Paris. The instrument differs; the spirit is the same. Legal exclusion can practice conquest as efficiently as a standing army. A corporate monopoly can practice it through systematic extortion. A revolutionary legislature can practice it by dissolving every prescriptive title and every inherited obligation in the name of abstract rights.
What makes the last case peculiarly dangerous is the seduction of novelty. To make everything the reverse of what has existed is, in a certain sense, easy: no difficulties occur in what has never been tried, and criticism is nearly baffled in discovering the defects of what has not yet existed.3 The spirit of conquest in its revolutionary form clothes itself in enthusiasm and cheating hope, and has all the wide field of imagination in which to expatiate without opposition.3
The discipline it cannot endure is the discipline of reform — of keeping the useful parts of an old establishment while fitting what is superadded to what is retained, a process that demands vigorous and steady attention, various powers of comparison, and a conflict sustained against both the obstinacy that rejects all improvement and the levity that is fatigued with everything it possesses.4
The true lawgiver, I wrote, ought to have a heart full of sensibility; he ought to love and respect his kind, and to fear himself.5 That fear — the fear of one's own confidence, one's own impatience — is precisely what the spirit of conquest cannot accommodate. It glories in performing in a few months the work of ages.5 And in that glory it renders multitudes miserable, because the subject of its demolition and construction is not brick and timber but sentient beings, whose state, condition, and habits cannot be suddenly altered without catastrophe.5
The spirit of conquest is, in the end, the refusal to be answerable — to the people governed, to the accumulated wisdom of their history, to the moral obligations that manners and religion have slowly deposited in the fabric of civil life. Where that answerability is destroyed, power does not disappear; it merely becomes worse.2
The usurpation which, in order to subvert ancient institutions, has destroyed ancient principles will hold power by arts similar to those by which it has acquired it. When the old feudal and chivalrous spirit of fealty, which, by freeing kings from fear, freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny, shall be extinct in the minds of men, plots and assassinations will be anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation.Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 68
Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle. When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated.Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 68
To make everything the reverse of what they have seen is quite as easy as to destroy. No difficulties occur in what has never been tried. Criticism is almost baffled in discovering the defects of what has not existed; and eager enthusiasm and cheating hope have all the wide field of imagination in which they may expatiate with little or no opposition.Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 148
When the useful parts of an old establishment are kept, and what is superadded is to be fitted to what is retained, a vigorous mind, steady, persevering attention, various powers of comparison and combination, and the resources of an understanding fruitful in expedients are to be exercised; they are to be exercised in a continued conflict with the combined force of opposite vices, with the obstinacy that rejects all improvement and the levity that is fatigued and disgusted with everything of which it is in possession.Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 148
It is one of the excellences of a method in which time is amongst the assistants, that its operation is slow and in some cases almost imperceptible... the subject of our demolition and construction is not brick and timber but sentient beings, by the sudden alteration of whose state, condition, and habits multitudes may be rendered miserable... The true lawgiver ought to have a heart full of sensibility. He ought to love and respect his kind, and to fear himself.Reflections on the Revolution in France, p. 148