Edmund Burke: “In vain will the law attempt to anticipate or to follow such studied neglects and fraudulent attentions.”

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 people of England will not ape the fashions they have never tried, nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial.

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.

Who could doubt but that, at any expense to the state, of which they understood nothing, they must pursue their private interests, which they understood but too well?