Ill would our ancestors at the Revolution have deserved their fame for wisdom, if they had found no security for their freedom, but in rendering their government feeble in its operations and precarious in its tenure,--if they had been able to contrive no better remedy against arbitrary power than civil confusion.
Reflecting on the Glorious Revolution, Burke argues that the wisdom of the ancestors lay in securing freedom without resorting to a feeble government or civil confusion as remedies against arbitrary power.
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This is the spirit of our Constitution, not only in its settled course, but in all its revolutions.
But the king of Great Britain obeys no other person; all other persons are individually, and collectively too, under him, and owe to him a legal obedience.
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…
A few years ago I should be ashamed to overload a matter so capable of supporting itself by the then unnecessary support of any argument; but this seditious, unconstitutional doctrine is now publicly taught, avowed, and printed.
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