[t]he science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or refining it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori.… - Edmund Burke

He insisted that it was a travelling delusion, that nations were not to interfere with each other: for if any nation endeavoured to confuse, to trample upon, violate or despise the rights of others, the interests of human society required that all should join against them. If, by the subversion of all law and religion, a nation adopts a malignant spirit to produce anarchy and mischief in other countries, it is the right of nations to go to war with them. In support of this doctrine, he quoted the authority of Vattel, who lays it down, that if one nation adopt principles injurious to all government and order, such a nation is to be opposed from principles of common safety. This, he insisted, was the spirit of France; and what was to keep the effects of it from England? War, and nothing else. Until, therefore, we could find that security in their principles and practices which could alone make peace permanent, he would never agree to prostrate the throne of Great Britain at the foot of any National Convention or Jacobin club whatever.

The whole scheme of our mixed constitution is to prevent any one of its principles from being carried as far, as taken by itself, and theoretically, it would go.... To avoid the perfections of extreme, all its several parts are so constituted, as not alone to answer their own several ends, but also each to limit and control the others: insomuch, that take which of the principles you please — you will find its operation checked and stopped at a certain point. The whole movement stands still rather than that any part should proceed beyond its boundary. From thence it results, that in the British constitution, there is a perpetual treaty and compromise going on, sometimes openly, sometimes with less observation. To him who contemplates the British constitution, as to him who contemplates the subordinate material world, it will always be a matter of his most curious investigation, to discover the secret of this mutual limitation.

Vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.