Edmund Burke: “Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege.”

By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided, not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy.

Do they mean to attaint and disable backwards all the kings that have reigned before the Revolution, and consequently to stain the throne of England with the blot of a continual usurpation?

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.

Unquestionably there was at the Revolution, in the person of King William, a small and a temporary deviation from the strict order of a regular hereditary succession; but it is against all genuine principles of jurisprudence to draw a…