[Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham by Harold J. Laski]@TWC D-Link bookPolitical Thought in England from Locke to Bentham CHAPTER VI 70/91
We know that no State can hope for peace in which large types of experience are without representation.
Indeed, if proof were here wanting, an examination of the eighteenth century would supply it.
Few would deny that statesmen are capable of disinterested sacrifice for classes of whose inner life they are ignorant; yet the relation between law and the interest of the dominant class is too intimate to permit with safety the exclusion of a part of the State from sharing in its guidance.
Nor did Burke remember his own wise saying that "in all disputes between the people and their rulers the presumption is at least upon a par in favor of the people"; and he quotes with agreement that great sentence of Sully's which traces popular violence to popular suffering.
No one can watch the economic struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or calculate the pain they have involved to humble men, without admitting that they represent the final protest of an outraged mind against oppression too intolerable to be borne.
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