The law by which this royal family is specifically destined to the succession, is the act of the 12th and 13th of King William. The terms of this act bind " us and our heirs, and our posterity, to them, their "heirs, and their posterity," being Protestants, to the end of time, in the same words as the Declaration of Right had bound us to the heirs of King William and Queen Mary. It therefore secures both an hereditary crown and an hereditary allegiance. On what ground, except the constitutional policy of forming an establishment to secure that kind of succession which is to preclude a choice of the people for ever, could the legislature have fasti- diously rejected the fair and abundant choice which our own country presented to them, and searched in strange lands for a foreign princess, from whose womb the line of our future rulers were to derive their title to govern millions of men through a series of ages?
d3 The Princess Sophia was named in the ai settlement of the 12th and 13th of King William, for a stock and root of inheritance to our kings, and not for her merits as a temporary administratrix of a power, which she might not, and in fact did not, herself ever exercise. She was adopted for one reason, and for pne only, because, says the o< t, " the most excellent Princess Sophia, Electress and " Duchess Dowager of Hanover, is daughter of the "most excellent Princess Elizabeth, late Queen ut' " Bohemia, daughter of our late sovereign lord King " James the First, of happy memory, and is hereby " declared to be the next in succession in the " Protestant line," &c. &c.; "and the crown shall "continue to the heirs of her body, being Pro- " testants." This limitation was made by parliament, that through the Princess Sophia an inheritable line, not only was to be continued in future, but (what they thought very material) that through her it was to be connected with the old stock of inheritance in King James the First; in order that the monarchy might preserve an unbroken unity through all ages, and might be preserved (with safety to our religion) in the old approved mode by descent, in which, if our liberties had been once endangered, they had often, through all storms and struggles of prerogative and privilege, been preserved. They did well. No experience has taught us, that in any other course or method than that of an hereditary croun, our liberties can be regularly perpetuated and preserved sacred as onr hereditary right. An irregular, con- vulsive movement may be necessary to throw off ail irregular, convulsive disci,,'. Bui the course of REVOLUTION IN FRANCE.;5!
succession is the healthy habit of the British constitution. Was it that the legislature wanted, at the act for the limitation of the crown in the Hanoverian line, drawn through the female descen- dants of James the First, a due sense of the inconveniencies of having two or three, or possibly more, foreigners in succession to the British throne? No! — they had- a due sense of the evils which might happen from such foreign rule, and more than a due sense of them. But a more decisive proof cannot be given of the full conviction of the British nation, that the principles of the Revolution did not authorize them to elect kings at their pleasure, and without any attention to the ancient fundamental principles of our government, than their continuing to adopt a plan of hereditary protestant succession in the old line, with all the dangers and all the inconveniencies of its being a foreign line full before their eyes, and operating with the utmost force upon their minds.
A few years ago I should be ashamed to overload a matter, so capable of supporting itself, by the then unnecessary support of any argument; but this seditious, unconstitutional doctrine is now publicly taught, avowed, and printed. The dislike I feel to revolutions, the signals for which have so often been given from pulpits; the spirit of change that is gone abroad; the total contempt which prevails with you, and may come to prevail with us, of all ancient institutions, when set in opposition to a present sense of convenience, or to the bent of a present inclination: all these considerations make it not unadvisable, in my opinion, to call back our atten- 32 REFLECTIONS ON THE tion to the true principles of our own domestic laws; that you, my French friend, should begin to know, and that we should continue to cherish them. We ought not, on either side of the water, to sutler ourselves to he imposed upon by the counterfeit wares which some persons, hy a douhle fraud, export to you in illicit bottoms, as raw commodities of British growth though wholly alien to our soil, in order afterwards tO smuggle them back again into this country, manufactured alter the newest Paris fashion of an improved liberty.
The people of England will not ape the fashions they have never tried; nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial. They look upon the legal hereditary succession of their crown as among their rights, not as among their wrongs; as a benefit, not as a grievance; as a security for their liberty, not as a badge of servitude. 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 constitution.
1 shall beg leave, before I go any further, to take notice of some paltry artifices, which the abettors of election as the only lawful title to the crown, are ready to employ, in order to render the support of the just principles of our constitution a task some- what invidious. These sophisters substitute a fictitious cause, and feigned personages, in whose favour they suppose you engaged, whenever you defend the inheritable nature of the crown. It is common with them to dispute as if they were in a conflict with REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. 33 some of those exploded fanatics of slavery, who formerly maintained, what I believe no creature now maintains, " that the crown is held by divine, hereditary, and indefeasible right." — These old fanatics of single arbitrary power dogmatized as if hereditary royalty was the only lawful government in the world, just as our new fanatics of popular arbitrary power, maintain that a popular election is the sole lawful source of authority. The old prerogative enthusiasts, it is true, did speculate foolishly, and perhaps impiously too, as if monarchy had more of a divine sanction than any other mode of government; and as if a right to govern by inheritance were in strictness indefeasible in every person who should be found in the succession to a throne, and under every circumstance, which no civil or political right can be. But an absurd opinion concerning the king's hereditary right, to the crown does not prejudice one that is rational, and bottomed upon solid principles of law and policy. If all the absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they are con- versant, we should have no law and no religion left in the world. But an absurd theory on one side of a question forms no justification for alleging a false fact, orpromulgating mischievous maximson theother. The second claim of the Revolution Society is " a right of cashiering their governors for mis- conduct." Perhaps the apprehensions our ancestors entertained of forming such a precedent as that " of cashiering for misconduct," was the cause that the declaration of the act which implied the abdication of King James, was, if it had any fault, rather too 34 REFLECTIONS ON THE guarded, and too circumstantial.* But all this guard, and all this accumulation of circumstances, serves to shew the spirit of caution which predominated in the national councils, in a situation in which men, irritated by oppression, and elevated by a triumph over it, are apt to ahandon themselves to violent and extreme courses: it shews the anxiety of the great men who influenced the conduct of affairs at that great event, to make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.
No government could stand a moment, if it could he Mown down with any thing so loose and indefinite as an opinion of " misconduct." They who led at the Revolution, grounded the virtual abdication of King James upon no such light and uncertain principle. They charged him with nothing less than a design, continued by a multitude of illegal overt acts, to subvert the Protestant church and state, and their fundamental, unquestionable laws and liberties: they charged him with having broken the original contract between king and people. This was more than misconduct. A grave and overruling necessity obliged them to take the step they took, and took with infinite reluctance, as under that most rigorous of all laws. Their trust for the future preservation of the constitution was not in future revolutions. The grand policy of all their regulations was to render it almost impracticable for any future sovereign • "That King James the Second, having endeavoured to subvert " the constitution of the kingdom, by breaking the original contract " between king and people, and, by the advice of Jesuits and other " wicked persons, having violated the fundamental laws, and having " withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, hath abdicated the govern- " ment, and the throne is thereby vacant."
REVOLUTION IN FKANCE. 35 to compel the states of the kingdom to have again recourse to those violent remedies. They left the crown what, in the eye and estimation of law, it had ever been, perfectly irresponsible. In order to lighten the crown still further, they aggravated responsibility on ministers of state. By the statute of the 1st of King William, sess. 2nd, called " the act "for declaring the rights and liberties of the subject, " and for settling the succession of the crown," they enacted, that the ministers should serve the crown on the terms of that declaration. They secured soon after the frequent meetings of parliament, by which the whole government would be under the constant inspection and active control of the popular representative and of the magnates of the kingdom. In the next great constitutional act, that of the 12th and 13th of King William, for the further limitation of the crown, and better securing the rights and liberties of the subject, they provided, "that no "pardon under the great seal of England should be "pleadable to an impeachment by the commons in "parliament." The rule laid down for government in the Declaration of Right, the constant inspection of parliament, the practical claim of impeachment, they thought infinitely a better security, not only for their constitutional liberty, but against the vices of administration, than the reservation of a right so difficult in the practice, so uncertain in the issue, and often so mischievous in the consequences, as that of " cashiering their governors."
Dr. Price, in this sermon,* condemns very pro- 36 Ml LECTIONS ON THE perly the practice of gross adulatory addresses to kiiiLcs. Instead of this fulsome style, he proposes that his majesty should he told, on occasions of con- gratulation, that "he is to consider himself as more properly the servant than the sovereign of his- people." For a compliment, this new form of address does not, seem to be very soothing. Those who are servants, in name as well as in effect, do not like to be told of their situation, their duty, and their obligations. The slave, in the old play, tells his master, " Hrcc commemoratio est quasi expro- bratio." It is not pleasant as compliment; it is not wholesome as instruction. After all, if the king were to bring himself to echo this new kind of address, to adopt it in terms, and even to take the appellation of " Servant of the People " as his royal style, how either he or we should be much mended by it, I cannot imagine. 1 have seen very assuming letters, signed, Your most obedient, humble servant. The proudest domination that ever was endured on earth took a title of still greater humility than that which is now proposed for sovereigns by the apostle of liberty. Kings and nations were trampled upon by the foot of one calling himself " the Servant of servants; " and mandates for deposing sovereigns were sealed with the signet of " the Fisherman."
I should have considered all this as no more than a sort of flippant, vain discourse, in which, as in an unsavoury fume, several persons suffer the spirit of liberty to evaporate, if it were not plainly in support of the idea, and a part of the scheme of "cashiering kings for misconduct." In that light it is worth some observation.
REVOLUTION IN FRANCE. -M Kings, in one sense, are undoubtedly the servants of the people, because their power has no other rational end than that of the general advantage; but it is not true that they are in the ordinary sense (by our constitution at least) any thing like servants; the essence of whose situation is to obey the commands of some other, and to be removeable at pleasure. But the king of Great Britain obeys no other person; all other persons are individually, and col- lectively too, under him, and owe to him a legal obedience. The law, which knows neither to flatter nor to insult, calls this high magistrate, not our servant, as this humble divine calls him, but " our sovereign Lord the King;" and we, on our parts, have learned to speak only the primitive language of the law, and not the confused jargon of their Baby- lonian pulpits.
As he is not to obey us, but as we are to obey the law in him, our constitution has made no sort of provision towards rendering him, as a servant, in any degree responsible. Our constitution knows nothing of a magistrate like the Justicia of Arragon; nor of any court legally appointed, nor of any process legally settled for submitting the king to the respon- sibility belonging to all servants. In this he is not distinguished from the commons and the lords, who, in their several public capacities, can never be called to an account for their conduct; although the Revo- lution Society chooses to assert, in direct opposition to one of the wisest and most beautiful parts of our constitution, that "a king is no more than the first servant of the public, created by it, and responsible to it" 38 HI. I LECTIONS ON THE 111 would our ancestors at the Revolution have deserved their fame for wisdom, if they had found no security for their freedom, but in rendering their government feeble in its operations, and precarious in its tenure; if they had been able to contrive no better remedy against arbitrary power than civil con- fusion. Let these gentlemen state who that repre- sentative public is to whom they will affirm the king, as a servant, to be responsible. It will be then time enough for me to produce to them the positive statute law which affirms that he is not.
The ceremony of cashiering kings, of which these gentlemen talk so much at their ease, can rarely, if ever, be performed without force. It then becomes a case of war, and not of constitution. Laws are commanded to hold their tongues amongst arms; and tribunals fall to the ground with the peace they are no longer able to uphold. The Revolution of 1688 was obtained by a just war, in the only case in which any war, and much more a civil war, can be just. " Justa bella quibus necessaria." The question of dethroning, or, if these gentlemen like the phrase better, "cashiering kings." will always be, as it has always been, an extraordinary question of state, and wholly out of the law; a question (like all other questions of state) of dispositions, and of means, and of probable consequences, rather than of positive rights. As it was not made for common abuses, so it is not to be agitated by common minds. The speculative line of demarcation, where obedience ought to end, and resistance must begin, is faint, obscure, and not easily definable. It is not a single act, or a single event, which determines it. Govern- REVOLUTION IN FRANCE..39 ments 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. When things are in that lamentable condition, the nature of the disease is to indicate the remedy to those whom nature has qualified to administer in extremities this critical, ambiguous, bitter potion to a distempered state. Times and occasions, and provocations, will teach their own lessons. The wise will determine from the gravity of the case; the irritable from sensibility to oppression; the high-minded from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands; the brave and bold from the love of honourable danger in a generous cause: but, with or without right, a revolution will be the very last resource of the thinking and the good.
The third head of right asserted by the pulpit of the Old Jewry, namely, the " right to form a government for ourselves," has, at least, as little countenance from any thing done at the Revolution, either in precedent or principle, as the two first of their claims. The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty. If you are desirous of knowing the spirit of our constitution, and the policy which predominated in that great period which has secured it to this hour, pray look for both in our histories, in our records, in our acts of parliament, and journals of parliament, and not in the sermons of the Old Jewry, and the after-dinner toasts of the Revolution Society. In the former you will find other ideas and another language.
40 REFLECTIONS O.N" THE Such a claim is as ill-suited to our temper and wishes, as it is unsupported hy any appearance of authority. The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, is enough to till us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revo- lution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers. Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any scion alien to the nature of riginal plant. All the reformations we have hitherto made, have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity; and I hope, nay I am persuaded, that all those which possibly may be made hereafter, will he carefully formed upon analogical precedent, authority, and example.
Our oldest reformation is that of Magna Charta. You will see that Sir Edward Coke, that great oracle of our law, and indeed all the great men who follow him, to Blackstone,* are industrious to prove the pedigree of our liberties. They endeavour to prove that the ancient charter, the Magna Charta of King John, was connected with another positive charter from Henry I., and that both the one and the other were nothing more than a re-affirmance of the still more ancient standing law of the kingdom. In the matter of fact, for the greater part, these authors appear to be in the right: perhaps not always: hut if the lawyers mistake in some particulars, it proves' my position still the more strongly; because it demonstrates the powerful prepossession towards antiquity, with which the minds of all our lawyers and legislators, and of all the people whom they a Charta, printed at D REVOLUTION IX FRANCE. 41 wish to influence, have been always filled; and the stationary policy of this kingdom »in considering their most sacred rights and franchises as an in- heritance.
In the famous law of the 3d of Charles I. called the Petition of Right, the parliament says to the king, " Your subjects have inherited this freedom," claiming their franchises not on abstract principles "as the rights of men," but as the rights of English- men, and as a patrimony derived from their forefathers. Selden, and the other profoundly learned men who drew this petition of right, were as well acquainted, at least, with all the general theories concerning the " rights of men," as any of the discoursers in our pulpits, or on your tribune; full as well as Dr. Price, or as the Abbe Sieyes. But, for reasons worthy of that practical wisdom which superseded their theoretic science, they preferred this positive, re- corded, hereditary title to all which can be dear to the man and the citizen, to that vague speculative right, which exposed their sure inheritance to be scrambled for and torn to pieces by every wild litigious spirit.
The same policy pervades all the laws which have since been made for the preservation of our liberties. In the 1st of William and Mary, in the famous statute called the Declaration of Right, the two houses utter not a syllable of "a right to frame a government for themselves." You will see that their whole care was to secure the religion, laws, and liberties, that had been long possessed, and had been lately endangered. "Taking* into their most 4:2 RKFLl CTIONS ON THE " serious consideration the best means for making '*such an establishment, that their religion, laws, "and liberties, might not be in danger of being "again subverted," they auspicate all their pro- ceedings, by stating as some of those best means, "in the first place" to do "as their ancestors in like " cases have usually done for vindicating their ancient "rights and liberties, to declare;" — and then they pray the king and queen, " that it may be declared "and enacted, that all and singular the rights and " liberties asserted anil declared are the true, ancient, '"and indubitable rights and liberties of the people " of this kingdom."
You will observe that, from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity; as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right. By this means our constitution preserves an unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown; an inheritable peerage; and a house of commons and a people inheriting privileges, fran- chises, and liberties, from a long line of ancestors.
This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection, or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it. A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides, the REVOLUTION IN" FRANCE. 43 people of England well know that the idea of in- heritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of -transmission, without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquisition free; hut it secures what it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state pro- ceeding on these maxims, are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement; grasped as in a kind of mort- main for ever. By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of Providence, are handed down, to us and from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts j wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our fore- fathers, we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of inheritance wc have s;iven to our 44 REFLEl TIONS ON Tin; frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.