The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke

from our vain institutions. Every good gift is of God; all power is of God; and He who has
given the power, and from whom alone it originates, will never suffer the exercise of it to
be practised upon any less solid foundation than the power itself. If, then, all dominion of
man over man is the effect of the Divine disposition, it is bound by the eternal laws of Him
that gave it, with which no human authority can dispense,—neither he that exercises it, nor
even those who are subject to it; and if they were mad enough to make an express compact
that should release their magistrate from his duty, and should declare their lives, liberties,
and properties dependent upon, not rules and laws, but his mere capricious will, that
covenant would be void. The acceptor of it has not his authority increased, but he has his
crime doubled. Therefore can it be imagined, if this be true, that He will suffer this great
gift of government, the greatest, the best, that was ever given by God to mankind, to be the
plaything and the sport of the feeble will of a man, who, by a blasphemous, absurd, and
petulant usurpation, would place his own feeble, contemptible, ridiculous will in the place
of the Divine wisdom and justice?

The title of conquest makes no difference at all. No conquest can give such a right; for
conquest, that is, force, cannot convert its own injustice into a just title, by which it may
rule others at its pleasure. By conquest, which is a more immediate designation of the hand
of God, the conqueror succeeds to all the painful duties and subordination to the power of
God which belonged to the sovereign whom he has displaced, just as if he had come in by
the positive law of some descent or some election. To this at least he is strictly bound: he
ought to govern them as he governs his own subjects. But every wise conqueror has gone
much further than he was bound to go. It has been his ambition and his policy to reconcile
the vanquished to his fortune, to show that they had gained by the change, to convert their
momentary suffering into a long benefit, and to draw from the humiliation of his enemies

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