Yet a chief-justice, sent to India to represent the sacred majesty of the crown of England, has gone so far as to say at your bar that no more doubt could be entertained of the existence either of the rebellion or the guilt of the Begums than of the rebellion in 1745.
Burke critiques the certainty expressed by a chief justice regarding the guilt of individuals involved in a rebellion.
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Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity.
When such an unwarrantable maxim is once established, that no throne is lawful but the elective, no one act of the princes who preceded this era of fictitious election can be valid.
Ill would our ancestors at the Revolution have deserved their fame for wisdom, if they had found no security for their freedom, but in rendering their government feeble in its operations and precarious in its tenure,--if they had been able…
They look upon the legal hereditary succession of their crown as among their rights, not as among their wrongs,--as a benefit, not as a grievance,--as a security for their liberty, not as a badge of servitude.
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