Edmund Burke: “Material resources never have supplied, nor ever can supply, the want of unity in design and constancy in pursuit.”

This is the spirit of our Constitution, not only in its settled course, but in all its revolutions.

Ill would our ancestors at the Revolution have deserved their fame for wisdom, if they had found no security for their freedom, but in rendering their government feeble in its operations and precarious in its tenure,--if they had been able…

It therefore secures both an hereditary crown and an hereditary allegiance.

We procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which Nature teaches us to revere individual men: on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended.