Things to Consider:

• Catholic Emancipation 
• Richard Price
• common law vs. statute law: The difference between the common law and statute is that whereas statute is codified, common law is not.

Edmund Burke (1729-1797)

• What appears to be Burke's central argument?

• Explain:  "People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors" (105).

• Explain: "The age of chivalry is gone" (108). [Is this necessarily a bad thing?]

• Explain: "All the good things which are connected with manners and with civilization, have, in this European world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles: . . . the nobility and the clergy" (110).

• Explain:  "Society is a contract" ==> "It becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born" (112).

• What is "sensibility" (113)? How does Wollstonecraft characterize Burke's embodiment of it?
• How does her definition of the rights of men compare with Burke's on pge. 106?

• Explain:  "The demon of property has ever been at hand to encroach on the sacred rights of men" (113-14).

• Explain:  "Virtue can only flourish among equals" (120).
• Explain her final statement.

• How do these excerpts compare? Do we get enough of Burke's text to appreciate all the references made by Wollstonecraft?

• Explain:  "Everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies" (103).
• cf. Rousseau's Emile:
• Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the author of things, everything degenerates in the hands of man. He forces one soil to nourish the products of another, one tree to bear the fruits of another. He mixes and confuses the climates, the elements, the seasons. He mutilates his dog, his horse, his slave. He turns everything upside down, he disfigures everything, he loves deformities, monsters. He wants nothing as nature made it, not even man himself. For him man must be trained like a saddle- horse; he must be shaped according to the fashion, like trees in his garden.

• Why must the constituent parts of the state all work together?
• What is the body politic?

• What is an entailed inheritance?
• What is "a permanent body composed of transitory parts" (105)?
• Explain: "In this choice of inheritance, we [are] . . . binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections" (105).

• Because of this inheritance, "the spirit of freedom . . . is tempered with an awful gravity" (106).
• Explain:  "We procure reverence to ur civil institutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to  revere individual men; on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended" (106).
• What is the difference between levelling and equalizing, according to Burke?  What is the "natural order of things" (106)?
• Explain: "Law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule" (106).
• Explain: "All men have equal rights; but not to equal things" (106). [Would Wollstonecraft agree?]

• Is this a sympathetic portrayal of Louis XVI? Of their captors?  Explain.

• Explain:  "All homage paid to the [female] sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly" (109). [Why is such a statement included in a discussion of the Revolution?]
• Explain:  "Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege, are but fictions of superstition" (109).
• Explain:  "Public affections, combined with manners, are required sometimes as supplements, sometimes as correctives, always as aids to law" (109).

• Explain:  "Our minds . . . are purified by terror and pity" (110).

• Explain the relevance of the analogies to drama that Burke employs here.
• Explain:  "He should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious | awe and trembling solicitude" (111).

• What is "the great primaeval contract of eternal society" (112)?

• Explain:  "The whole tenor of his plausible arguments settles slavery on an everlasting foundation" (115).

• What is primogeniture?  How, according to Wollstonecraft, does it lead to parental tyranny?
• How, according to Wollstonecraft, does it impact individual morality?

• Why does Wollstonecraft agree with Burke's views on the "homage paid to the [female] sex" (117)?
• Explain her discussion of the missing "father" in the quote from Burke.
• Explain:  "When the heart speaks we are seldom shocked by hyperbole" (117).

• Explain:  "Improveable reason has not yet discovered the perfection it may arrive at--God forbid!" (118).

• Explain this quote from Burke:  "'They must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice'" (119).

• What is the "fostering sun of kindness" (120)?
• 120n:
• What are "enclosure acts"? How do they contribute to the problems Wollstonecraft is discussing?
• Explain:  "Is the humane heart satisfied with turning the poor over to another world, to receive the blessings this could afford?" (120).
• Who/What is "the idol human weakness had set up?  Explain.