Edmund Burke: “They are, what they always were, (except by the able use of opportunities,) by far the weakest party in this country.”

Every honest mind, every true lover of liberty and humanity, must rejoice to find that injustice is not always good policy, nor rapine the high-road to riches.

Of this consolation whoever deprives them deadens their industry, and strikes at the root of all acquisition as of all conservation.

To tell the people that they are relieved by the dilapidation of their public estate is a cruel and insolent imposition.

I think our happy situation owing to our Constitution,--but owing to the whole of it, and not to any part singly,--owing in a great measure to what we have left standing in our several reviews and reformations, as well as to what we have…