Edmund Burke: “If I am to understand the conclusion of the Declaration to be what unfortunately it seems to me, we make an engagement…”

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

The ceremony of cashiering kings, of which these gentlemen talk so much at their ease, can rarely, if ever, be performed without force.

Their objects would be enlarged with their elevation; but their disposition, and habits, and mode of accomplishing their designs must remain the same.

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…