Edmund Burke: “They have swept away the very constitutions under which the legislatures acted and the laws were made.”

This is the spirit of our Constitution, not only in its settled course, but in all its revolutions.

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.

But supposing they had ranked as they ought to do, and as with us they do actually, the sides of sick-beds are not the academies for forming statesmen and legislators.

Their trust for the future preservation of the Constitution was not in future revolutions.