Edmund Burke: “If he offers nothing under misfortune, it is probable that it is more painful to him to abandon the prospect of…”

The speculative line of demarcation, where obedience ought to end and resistance must begin, is faint, obscure, and not easily definable.

It therefore secures both an hereditary crown and an hereditary allegiance.

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.

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…