Edmund Burke: “He felt that nothing else can protect it against the levity of courts, and the greater levity of the multitude.”

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.

The speculative line of demarcation, where obedience ought to end and resistance must begin, is faint, obscure, and not easily definable.

Who could conceive that men who are habitually meddling, daring, subtle, active, of litigious dispositions and unquiet minds, would easily fall back into their old condition of obscure contention, and laborious, low, and unprofitable…

They have little regard to the obvious consequences of their doctrine, though they may see that it leaves positive authority in very few of the positive institutions of this country.