A timid jury will give way to an awful judge delivering oracularly the law, and charging them on their oaths, and putting it home to their consciences to beware of judging, where the law had given them no competence.
Burke discusses the impact of a fearful jury under the pressure of a powerful judge.
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Their trust for the future preservation of the Constitution was not in future revolutions.
Governments must be abused and deranged indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past.
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.
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.
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