Edmund Burke: “To mortgage the public revenue implies the sovereign dominion, in the fullest sense, over the public purse.”

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?

Do they mean to attaint and disable backwards all the kings that have reigned before the Revolution, and consequently to stain the throne of England with the blot of a continual usurpation?

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.

Who could doubt but that, at any expense to the state, of which they understood nothing, they must pursue their private interests, which they understood but too well?