Edmund Burke: “I was persuaded that government was a practical thing, made for the happiness of mankind, and not to furnish out a…”

If kings who did not owe their crown to the choice of their people had no title to make laws, what will become of the statute De tallagio non concedendo? of the Petition of Right? of the act of Habeas Corpus?

The engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the Constitution, forbids such invasion and such surrender.

If all the absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they are conversant, we should have no law and no religion left in the world.

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…