My Lords, I do admit that all true, genuine, and unadulterated justice considers with a certain degree of tenderness the person whom it is called to punish, and never oppresses those by the process who ought not to be oppressed but by the sentence of the court before which they are brought.
Burke acknowledges the need for justice to be tempered with compassion, ensuring that punishment is fair and just.
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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.
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.
If all the absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they are conversant, we should have no law and no religion left in the world.
Do they mean to attaint and disable backwards all the kings that have reigned before the Revolution, and consequently to stain the throne of England with the blot of a continual usurpation?
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