who that representative publick 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 conftitution. 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 " neceffaria." The question of dethroning, or, if these gentlemen like the phrase better, " cashier" ing 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, obfcure, and not easily definable. It is not a fingle act, or a fingle event, which determines it. Governments must be abused : 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 wife will determine from the gravity of the cafe; the irritable from sensibility to oppreffion; the high-minded from disdain and indignation at abufive 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, afferted 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 defirous of knowing the spirit of our constitution, and the policy which predominated in that great period which has fecured 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 fermons of the Old Jewry, and the after-dinner toasts of the revolution society. In the former you will find other ideas and another language. Such a claim is as ill-fuited to our temper and wishes as it is unsupported by any appearance of authority. The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, is enough to fill us with disgust and horrour. We wished at the period of the revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we pofsess 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 the original plant. All the reformations we have hitherto made, have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity; and I hope, nay I am perfuaded, that all those which poffibly may be made hereafter, will be carefully formed upon analogical precedent, authority, and example. look 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 * See Blackstone's Magna Charta, printed at Oxford, 1759. positive positive charter from Henry I. and that both the one and the other were nothing more than a reaffirmance 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: but if the lawyers mistake in some particulars, it proves my position still the more strongly; because it demonstrates the power, ful prepoffeffion towards antiquity, with which the minds of all our lawyers and legiflators, and of all the people whom they wish to influence, have been always filled; and the stationary policy of this kingdom in confidering their most sacred rights and franchises as an inheritance. In the famous law of the 3d of Charles I. called the Petition of Right, the parliament says to the king, "Your fubjects have inherited this freedom," claiming their franchises not on abstract principles " as the rights of men," but as the rights of Eng. lishmen, 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 difcourfers in our pulpits, or on your tribune; full as well as Dr. Price, or as the Abbé Syeyes. But, for reasons worthy of that practical wisdom which superseded their theoretick science, they preferred this positive, recorded, hereditary title to all which can be dear to the man and the citizen, to that vague speculative right, which ex posed their sure inheritance to be scrambled for and torn to pieces by every wild litigious spirit. "Tak The fame policy pervades all the laws which have since been made for the prefervation of our liberties. In the ist of William and Mary, in the famous ftatute, 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 fecure the religion, laws, and liberties, that had been long pofsessed, and had been lately endangered. "ing* into their most serious confideration the "best means for making fuch an establishment, " that their religion, laws, and liberties, might not " be in danger of being again fubverted," they aufpicate all their proceedings, by stating as some of those best means, " in the first place" to do "as " their ancestors in like cafes 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 fingular the rights and liberties afferted "and declared are the true ancient and indubitable " rights and liberties of the people of this king" dom." You will obferve, that from magna charta to |