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 antient fundamental principles of our government, than their continuing to adopt a plan of hereditary Proteftant 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 feditious, unconstitutional doctrine is now publicly taught, avowed, and printed. The dislike I feel to revolutions, the signals for which have fo 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 antient institutions, when fet in oppofition to a present sense of convenience, or to the bent of a present inclination: all these confiderations make it not unadviseable, in my opinion, to call back our attention 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 fide of the water, to fuffer ourselves to be impofed upon by the counterfeit wares which fome persons, by a double

D2

double fraud, export to you in illicit bottoms, as raw commodities of British growth though wholly alien to our foil, in order afterwards to fmuggle them back again into this country, manufactured after 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 fuccession 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 fervitude. They look on the frame of their commonwealth, fuch as it stands, to be of inestimable value; and they conceive the undifturbed fuccession of the crown to be a pledge of the stability and perpetuity of all the other members of our constitution.

I 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 fupport of the just principles of our conftitution a task somewhat invidious. These sophifters substitute a fictious 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 fome of those exploded fanatics of flavery, who formerly maintained, what I believe no creature

ROW

now maintains, " that the crown is held by di"vine, 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 fole lawful fource 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 folid principles of law and policy. If all the absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they are converfant, we should have no law, and no religion, left in the world. But an absurd theory on one fide of a question forms no justification for alledging a false fact, or promulgating mischievous maxims on the other.

The second claim of the Revolution Society is " a right of cashiering their governors for "misconduct." 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,

D3

was, if it had any fault, rather too 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 fituation in which men irritated by oppression, and elevated by a triumph over it, are apt to abandon 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 fettlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions.

No government could stand a moment, if it could be blown down with any thing so loofe 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, confirmed by a multitude of illegal overt acts, to fubvert 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 over-ruling neceffity 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 fovereign 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 ist of king Willlam, sess. 2d, called “ the act for declaring the rights and liberties of the "fubject, and for settling the fucceffion of the "crown," they enacted, that the ministers should ferve the crown on the terms of that declaration. They secured foon after the frequent meetings of parliament, by which the whole government would be under the constant inspection and active controul 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,