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Burke, Edmund, 1729-1797

"The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 04 (of 12)"


[Sidenote: No corporations of justice, commerce, or police.]
As no individuals have power and influence, so there are no
corporations, whether of lawyers or burghers, existing. The Assembly
called Constituent, destroyed all such institutions very early. The
primary and secondary assemblies, by their original constitution, were
to be dissolved when they answered the purpose of electing the
magistrates, and were expressly disqualified from performing any
corporate act whatsoever. The transient magistrates have been almost all
removed before the expiration of their terms, and new have been lately
imposed upon the people without the form or ceremony of an election.
These magistrates during their existence are put under, as all the
executive authorities are from first to last, the popular societies
(called Jacobin clubs) of the several countries, and this by an express
order of the National Convention: it is even made a case of death to
oppose or attack those clubs. They, too, have been lately subjected to
an expurgatory scrutiny, to drive out from them everything savoring of
what they call the crime of _moderantism_, of which offence, however,
few were guilty.


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