Edmund Burke: “They were crimes, not against forms, but against those eternal laws of justice which are our rule and our birthright.”

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.

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

The House of Lords, for instance, is not morally competent to dissolve the House of Commons,--no, nor even to dissolve itself, nor to abdicate, if it would, its portion in the legislature of the kingdom.

But the course of succession is the healthy habit of the British Constitution.