Now, if your Lordships will try him by such maxims and principles, he is certainly clear: for there is no manner of doubt that there is nothing he has practised once which he has not practised again; and then the repetition of crimes becomes the means of his indemnity.
Burke critiques the defendant's repeated offenses, suggesting that their history of crimes should not absolve them.
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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.
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.
They look on the frame of their commonwealth, such as it stands, to be of inestimable value; and they conceive the undisturbed succession of the crown to be a pledge of the stability and perpetuity of all the other members of our…
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.
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