Edmund Burke: “They are men whose characters this country will ever respect, honor, and revere, both the living and the dead,--the dead…”

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

Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity.

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.

No experience has taught us that in any other course or method than that of an hereditary crown our liberties can be regularly perpetuated and preserved sacred as our hereditary right.