Edmund Burke: “I would therefore, after their example, divide the public debts into three sorts,--good, bad, and doubtful.”

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.

This is the spirit of our Constitution, not only in its settled course, but in all its 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.

They threw a politic, well-wrought veil over every circumstance tending to weaken the rights which in the meliorated order of succession they meant to perpetuate, or which might furnish a precedent for any future departure from what they…