Edmund Burke: “We charge this as a substantive crime, and as the forerunner of the oppression, desolation, and ruin of that miserable…”

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.

If kings who did not owe their crown to the choice of their people had no title to make laws, what will become of the statute De tallagio non concedendo? of the Petition of Right? of the act of Habeas Corpus?

The engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the Constitution, forbids such invasion and such surrender.

They threw a politic, well-wrought veil over every circumstance tending to weaken the rights which in the meliorated order of succession they meant to perpetuate, or which might furnish a precedent for any future departure from what they…