Edmund Burke: “A council of mercy ought therefore to be appointed, with powers to report on each case, to soften the penalty, or…”

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.

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.

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

The engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the Constitution, forbids such invasion and such surrender.