Children are not consenting to their relation; but their relation, without their actual consent, binds them to its duties,--or rather it implies their consent, because the presumed consent of every rational creature is in unison with the predisposed order of things.
Burke reflects on the duties of children towards their parents, suggesting that their relationship implies consent to these duties.
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All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for…
The House of Lords, for instance, is not morally competent to dissolve the House of Commons,--no, nor even to dissolve itself, nor to abdicate, if it would, its portion in the legislature of the kingdom.
But the king of Great Britain obeys no other person; all other persons are individually, and collectively too, under him, and owe to him a legal obedience.
Governments must be abused and deranged indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past.
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