Edmund Burke: “Hastings himself, who did not seem to stimulate his accountants to a vast deal of exactness and a vast deal of fidelity…”

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 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…

But an absurd theory on one side of a question forms no justification for alleging a false fact or promulgating mischievous maxims on the other.

If kings who did not owe their crown to the choice of their people had no title to make laws, what will become of the statute De tallagio non concedendo? of the Petition of Right? of the act of Habeas Corpus?