Nay, we are apt to urge our dislike of such measures as a reason for imitating them,--and, by an almost incredible absurdity, because some powers have destroyed their country by their persecuting spirit, to argue, that we ought to retaliate on them by destroying our own.
Burke critiques the absurdity of retaliating against oppression by inflicting harm on oneself.
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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.
Though a king may abdicate for his own person, he cannot abdicate for the monarchy.
The people of England will not ape the fashions they have never tried, nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial.
So far is it from being true that we acquired a right by the Revolution to elect our kings, that, if we had possessed it before, the English nation did at that time most solemnly renounce and abdicate it, for themselves, and for all their…
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