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The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 04 (of 12) by Edmund Burke
page 6 of 434 (01%)
which attends on every measure of human prudence, nothing seems a surer
antidote to the poison of fraud than its detection. It is true, the
fraud may be swallowed after this discovery, and perhaps even swallowed
the more greedily for being a detected fraud. Men sometimes make a point
of honor not to be disabused; and they had rather fall into an hundred
errors than confess one. But, after all, when neither our principles nor
our dispositions, nor, perhaps, our talents, enable us to encounter
delusion with delusion, we must use our best reason to those that ought
to be reasonable creatures, and to take our chance for the event. We
cannot act on these anomalies in the minds of men. I do not conceive
that the persons who have contrived these things can be made much the
better or the worse for anything which can be said to them. _They_ are
reason-proof. Here and there, some men, who were at first carried away
by wild, good intentions, may be led, when their first fervors are
abated, to join in a sober survey of the schemes into which they had
been deluded. To those only (and I am sorry to say they are not likely
to make a large description) we apply with any hope. I may speak it upon
an assurance almost approaching to absolute knowledge, that nothing has
been done that has not been contrived from the beginning, even before
the States had assembled. _Nulla nova mihi res inopinave surgit._ They
are the same men and the same designs that they were from the first,
though varied in their appearance. It was the very same animal that at
first crawled about in the shape of a caterpillar that you now see rise
into the air and expand his wings to the sun.

Proceeding, therefore, as we are obliged to proceed,--that is, upon an
hypothesis that we address rational men,--can false political principles
be more effectually exposed than by demonstrating that they lead to
consequences directly inconsistent with and subversive of the
arrangements grounded upon them? If this kind of demonstration is not
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