Reflections on the Revolution in France
by Edmund Burke
IT MAY NOT BE UNNECESSARY to inform the reader that the following
Reflections had their origin in a correspondence between the Author and a
very young gentleman at Paris, who did him the honor of desiring his
opinion upon the important transactions which then, and ever since, have so
much occupied the attention of all men. An answer was written some time in
the month of October 1789, but it was kept back upon prudential
considerations. That letter is alluded to in the beginning of the following
sheets. It has been since forwarded to the person to whom it was addressed.
The reasons for the delay in sending it were assigned in a short letter to
the same gentleman. This produced on his part a new and pressing
application for the Author's sentiments.
The Author began a second and more full discussion on the subject. This he
had some thoughts of publishing early in the last spring; but, the matter
gaining upon him, he found that what he had undertaken not only far
exceeded the measure of a letter, but that its importance required rather a
more detailed consideration than at that time he had any leisure to bestow
upon it. However, having thrown down his first thoughts in the form of a
letter, and, indeed, when he sat down to write, having intended it for a
private letter, he found it difficult to change the form of address when
his sentiments had grown into a greater extent and had received another
direction. A different plan, he is sensible, might be more favorable to a
commodious division and distribution of his matter.
Dear Sir,
You are pleased to call again, and with some earnestness, for my thoughts
on the late proceedings in France. I will not give you reason to imagine
that I think my sentiments of such value as to wish myself to be solicited
about them. They are of too little consequence to be very anxiously either
communicated or withheld. It was from attention to you, and to you only,
that I hesitated at the time when you first desired to receive them. In the
first letter I had the honor to write to you, and which at length I send, I
wrote neither for, nor from, any description of men, nor shall I in this.
My errors, if any, are my own. My reputation alone is to answer for them.
You see, Sir, by the long letter I have transmitted to you, that though I
do most heartily wish that France may be animated by a spirit of rational
liberty, and that I think you bound, in all honest policy, to provide a
permanent body in which that spirit may reside, and an effectual organ by
which it may act, it is my misfortune to entertain great doubts concerning
several material points in your late transactions.
YOU IMAGINED, WHEN YOU WROTE LAST, that I might possibly be reckoned among
the approvers of certain proceedings in France, from the solemn public seal
of sanction they have received from two clubs of gentlemen in London,
called the Constitutional Society and the Revolution Society.
I certainly have the honor to belong to more clubs than one, in which the
constitution of this kingdom and the principles of the glorious Revolution
are held in high reverence, and I reckon myself among the most forward in
my zeal for maintaining that constitution and those principles in their
utmost purity and vigor. It is because I do so, that I think it necessary
for me that there should be no mistake. Those who cultivate the memory of
our Revolution and those who are attached to the constitution of this
kingdom will take good care how they are involved with persons who, under
the pretext of zeal toward the Revolution and constitution, too frequently
wander from their true principles and are ready on every occasion to depart
from the firm but cautious and deliberate spirit which produced the one,
and which presides in the other. Before I proceed to answer the more
material particulars in your letter, I shall beg leave to give you such
information as I have been able to obtain of the two clubs which have
thought proper, as bodies, to interfere in the concerns of France, first
assuring you that I am not, and that I have never been, a member of either
of those societies.
The first, calling itself the Constitutional Society, or Society for
Constitutional Information, or by some such title, is, I believe, of seven
or eight years standing. The institution of this society appears to be of a
charitable and so far of a laudable nature; it was intended for the
circulation, at the expense of the members, of many books which few others
would be at the expense of buying, and which might lie on the hands of the
booksellers, to the great loss of an useful body of men. Whether the books,
so charitably circulated, were ever as charitably read is more than I know.
Possibly several of them have been exported to France and, like goods not
in request here, may with you have found a market. I have heard much talk
of the lights to be drawn from books that are sent from hence. What
improvements they have had in their passage (as it is said some liquors are
meliorated by crossing the sea) I cannot tell; but I never heard a man of
common judgment or the least degree of information speak a word in praise
of the greater part of the publications circulated by that society, nor
have their proceedings been accounted, except by some of themselves, as of
any serious consequence.
Your National Assembly seems to entertain much the same opinion that I do
of this poor charitable club. As a nation, you reserved the whole stock of
your eloquent acknowledgments for the Revolution Society, when their
fellows in the Constitutional were, in equity, entitled to some share.
Since you have selected the Revolution Society as the great object of your
national thanks and praises, you will think me excusable in making its late
conduct the subject of my observations. The National Assembly of France has
given importance to these gentlemen by adopting them; and they return the
favor by acting as a committee in England for extending the principles of
the National Assembly. Henceforward we must consider them as a kind of
privileged persons, as no inconsiderable members in the diplomatic body.
This is one among the revolutions which have given splendor to obscurity,
and distinction to undiscerned merit. Until very lately I do not recollect
to have heard of this club. I am quite sure that it never occupied a moment
of my thoughts, nor, I believe, those of any person out of their own set. I
find, upon inquiry, that on the anniversary of the Revolution in 1688, a
club of dissenters, but of what denomination I know not, have long had the
custom of hearing a sermon in one of their churches; and that afterwards
they spent the day cheerfully, as other clubs do, at the tavern. But I
never heard that any public measure or political system, much less that the
merits of the constitution of any foreign nation, had been the subject of a
formal proceeding at their festivals, until, to my inexpressible surprise,
I found them in a sort of public capacity, by a congratulatory address,
giving an authoritative sanction to the proceedings of the National
Assembly in France.
In the ancient principles and conduct of the club, so far at least as they
were declared, I see nothing to which I could take exception. I think it
very probable that for some purpose new members may have entered among
them, and that some truly Christian politicians, who love to dispense
benefits but are careful to conceal the hand which distributes the dole,
may have made them the instruments of their pious designs. Whatever I may
have reason to suspect concerning private management, I shall speak of
nothing as of a certainty but what is public.
For one, I should be sorry to be thought, directly or indirectly, concerned
in their proceedings. I certainly take my full share, along with the rest
of the world, in my individual and private capacity, in speculating on what
has been done or is doing on the public stage in any place ancient or
modern; in the republic of Rome or the republic of Paris; but having no
general apostolical mission, being a citizen of a particular state and
being bound up, in a considerable degree, by its public will, I should
think it at least improper and irregular for me to open a formal public
correspondence with the actual government of a foreign nation, without the
express authority of the government under which I live.
I should be still more unwilling to enter into that correspondence under
anything like an equivocal description, which to many, unacquainted with
our usages, might make the address, in which I joined, appear as the act of
persons in some sort of corporate capacity acknowledged by the laws of this
kingdom and authorized to speak the sense of some part of it. On account of
the ambiguity and uncertainty of unauthorized general descriptions, and of
the deceit which may be practiced under them, and not from mere formality,
the House of Commons would reject the most sneaking petition for the most
trifling object, under that mode of signature to which you have thrown open
the folding doors of your presence chamber, and have ushered into your
National Assembly with as much ceremony and parade, and with as great a
bustle of applause, as if you have been visited by the whole representative
majesty of the whole English nation. If what this society has thought
proper to send forth had been a piece of argument, it would have signified
little whose argument it was. It would be neither the more nor the less
convincing on account of the party it came from. But this is only a vote
and resolution. It stands solely on authority; and in this case it is the
mere authority of individuals, few of whom appear. Their signatures ought,
in my opinion, to have been annexed to their instrument. The world would
then have the means of knowing how many they are; who they are; and of what
value their opinions may be, from their personal abilities, from their
knowledge, their experience, or their lead and authority in this state. To
me, who am but a plain man, the proceeding looks a little too refined and
too ingenious; it has too much the air of a political strategem adopted for
the sake of giving, under a high-sounding name, an importance to the public
declarations of this club which, when the matter came to be closely
inspected, they did not altogether so well deserve. It is a policy that has
very much the complexion of a fraud.
I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as
any gentleman of that society, be he who he will; and perhaps I have given
as good proofs of my attachment to that cause in the whole course of my
public conduct. I think I envy liberty as little as they do to any other
nation. But I cannot stand forward and give praise or blame to anything
which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the
object, as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and
solitude of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some
gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle
its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are
what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to
mankind. Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good;
yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France on her
enjoyment of a government (for she then had a government) without inquiry
what the nature of that government was, or how it was administered? Can I
now congratulate the same nation upon its freedom? Is it because liberty in
the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am
seriously to felicitate a madman, who has escaped from the protecting
restraint and wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the
enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and
murderer who has broke prison upon the recovery of his natural rights? This
would be to act over again the scene of the criminals condemned to the
galleys, and their heroic deliverer, the metaphysic Knight of the Sorrowful
Countenance.
When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at
work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild
gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose; but we ought to suspend our
judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the
liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of
a troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before I venture
publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really
received one. Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver, and
adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. I should,
therefore, suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France until I
was informed how it had been combined with government, with public force,
with the discipline and obedience of armies, with the collection of an
effective and well-distributed revenue, with morality and religion, with
the solidity of property, with peace and order, with civil and social
manners. All these (in their way) are good things, too, and without them
liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue
long. The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they
please; we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk
congratulations which may be soon turned into complaints. Prudence would
dictate this in the case of separate, insulated, private men, but liberty,
when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare
themselves, will observe the use which is made of power and particularly of
so trying a thing as new power in new persons of whose principles, tempers,
and dispositions they have little or no experience, and in situations where
those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the
real movers.
ALL these considerations, however, were below the transcendental dignity of
the Revolution Society. Whilst I continued in the country, from whence I
had the honor of writing to you, I had but an imperfect idea of their
transactions. On my coming to town, I sent for an account of their
proceedings, which had been published by their authority, containing a
sermon of Dr. Price, with the Duke de Rochefoucault's and the Archbishop of
Aix's letter, and several other documents annexed. The whole of that
publication, with the manifest design of connecting the affairs of France
with those of England by drawing us into an imitation of the conduct of the
National Assembly, gave me a considerable degree of uneasiness. The effect
of that conduct upon the power, credit, prosperity, and tranquility of
France became every day more evident. The form of constitution to be
settled for its future polity became more clear. We are now in a condition
to discern, with tolerable exactness, the true nature of the object held up
to our imitation. If the prudence of reserve and decorum dictates silence
in some circumstances, in others prudence of a higher order may justify us
in speaking our thoughts. The beginnings of confusion with us in England
are at present feeble enough, but, with you, we have seen an infancy still
more feeble growing by moments into a strength to heap mountains upon
mountains and to wage war with heaven itself. Whenever our neighbor's house
is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions than ruined by too
confident a security.
Solicitous chiefly for the peace of my own country, but by no means
unconcerned for yours, I wish to communicate more largely what was at first
intended only for your private satisfaction. I shall still keep your
affairs in my eye and continue to address myself to you. Indulging myself
in the freedom of epistolary intercourse, I beg leave to throw out my
thoughts and express my feelings just as they arise in my mind, with very
little attention to formal method. I set out with the proceedings of the
Revolution Society, but I shall not confine myself to them. Is it possible
I should? It appears to me as if I were in a great crisis, not of the
affairs of France alone, but of all Europe, perhaps of more than Europe.
All circumstances taken together, the French revolution is the most
astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world. The most wonderful
things are brought about, in many instances by means the most absurd and
ridiculous, in the most ridiculous modes, and apparently by the most
contemptible instruments. Everything seems out of nature in this strange
chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together
with all sorts of follies. In viewing this monstrous tragicomic scene, the
most opposite passions necessarily succeed and sometimes mix with each
other in the mind: alternate contempt and indignation, alternate laughter
and tears, alternate scorn and horror.
It cannot, however, be denied that to some this strange scene appeared in
quite another point of view. Into them it inspired no other sentiments than
those of exultation and rapture. They saw nothing in what has been done in
France but a firm and temperate exertion of freedom, so consistent, on the
whole, with morals and with piety as to make it deserving not only of the
secular applause of dashing Machiavellian politicians, but to render it a
fit theme for all the devout effusions of sacred eloquence.
On the forenoon of the fourth of November last, Doctor Richard Price, a
non-conforming minister of eminence, preached, at the dissenting meeting
house of the Old Jewry, to his club or society, a very extraordinary
miscellaneous sermon, in which there are some good moral and religious
sentiments, and not ill expressed, mixed up in a sort of porridge of
various political opinions and reflections; but the Revolution in France is
the grand ingredient in the cauldron. I consider the address transmitted by
the Revolution Society to the National Assembly, through Earl Stanhope, as
originating in the principles of the sermon and as a corollary from them.
It was moved by the preacher of that discourse. It was passed by those who
came reeking from the effect of the sermon without any censure or
qualification, expressed or implied. If, however, any of the gentlemen
concerned shall wish to separate the sermon from the resolution, they know
how to acknowledge the one and to disavow the other. They may do it: I
cannot.
For my part, I looked on that sermon as the public declaration of a man
much connected with literary caballers and intriguing philosophers, with
political theologians and theological politicians both at home and abroad.
I know they set him up as a sort of oracle, because, with the best
intentions in the world, he naturally philippizes and chants his prophetic
song in exact unison with their designs.
That sermon is in a strain which I believe has not been heard in this
kingdom, in any of the pulpits which are tolerated or encouraged in it,
since the year 1648, when a predecessor of Dr. Price, the Rev. Hugh Peters,
made the vault of the king's own chapel at St. James's ring with the honor
and privilege of the saints, who, with the "high praises of God in their
mouths, and a two-edged sword in their hands, were to execute judgment on
the heathen, and punishments upon the people; to bind their kings with
chains, and their nobles with fetters of iron". [1] Few harangues from the
pulpit, except in the days of your league in France or in the days of our
Solemn League and Covenant in England, have ever breathed less of the
spirit of moderation than this lecture in the Old Jewry. Supposing,
however, that something like moderation were visible in this political
sermon, yet politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement.
No sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice of Christian
charity. The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as
that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper
character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part,
ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume.
Wholly unacquainted with the world in which they are so fond of meddling,
and inexperienced in all its affairs on which they pronounce with so much
confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they excite.
Surely the church is a place where one day's truce ought to be allowed to
the dissensions and animosities of mankind.
This pulpit style, revived after so long a discontinuance, had to me the
air of novelty, and of a novelty not wholly without danger. I do not charge
this danger equally to every part of the discourse. The hint given to a
noble and reverend lay divine, who is supposed high in office in one of our
universities, [2] and other lay divines "of rank and literature" may be
proper and seasonable, though somewhat new. If the noble Seekers should
find nothing to satisfy their pious fancies in the old staple of the
national church, or in all the rich variety to be found in the
well-assorted warehouses of the dissenting congregations, Dr. Price advises
them to improve upon non-conformity and to set up, each of them, a separate
meeting house upon his own particular principles. [3] (2) It is somewhat
remarkable that this reverend divine should be so earnest for setting up
new churches and so perfectly indifferent concerning the doctrine which may
be taught in them. His zeal is of a curious character. It is not for the
propagation of his own opinions, but of any opinions. It is not for the
diffusion of truth, but for the spreading of contradiction. Let the noble
teachers but dissent, it is no matter from whom or from what. This great
point once secured, it is taken for granted their religion will be rational
and manly. I doubt whether religion would reap all the benefits which the
calculating divine computes from this "great company of great preachers".
It would certainly be a valuable addition of nondescripts to the ample
collection of known classes, genera and species, which at present beautify
the hortus siccus of dissent. A sermon from a noble duke, or a noble
marquis, or a noble earl, or baron bold would certainly increase and
diversify the amusements of this town, which begins to grow satiated with
the uniform round of its vapid dissipations. I should only stipulate that
these new Mess-Johns in robes and coronets should keep some sort of bounds
in the democratic and leveling principles which are expected from their
titled pulpits. The new evangelists will, I dare say, disappoint the hopes
that are conceived of them. They will not become, literally as well as
figuratively, polemic divines, nor be disposed so to drill their
congregations that they may, as in former blessed times, preach their
doctrines to regiments of dragoons and corps of infantry and artillery.
Such arrangements, however favorable to the cause of compulsory freedom,
civil and religious, may not be equally conducive to the national
tranquility. These few restrictions I hope are no great stretches of
intolerance, no very violent exertions of despotism.
BUT I may say of our preacher "utinam nugis tota illa dedisset tempora
saevitiae". -- All things in this his fulminating bull are not of so
innoxious a tendency. His doctrines affect our constitution in its vital
parts. He tells the Revolution Society in this political sermon that his
Majesty "is almost the only lawful king in the world because the only one
who owes his crown to the choice of his people." As to the kings of the
world, all of whom (except one) this archpontiff of the rights of men, with
all the plenitude and with more than the boldness of the papal deposing
power in its meridian fervor of the twelfth century, puts into one sweeping
clause of ban and anathema and proclaims usurpers by circles of longitude
and latitude, over the whole globe, it behooves them to consider how they
admit into their territories these apostolic missionaries who are to tell
their subjects they are not lawful kings. That is their concern. It is
ours, as a domestic interest of some moment, seriously to consider the
solidity of the only principle upon which these gentlemen acknowledge a
king of Great Britain to be entitled to their allegiance.
This doctrine, as applied to the prince now on the British throne, either
is nonsense and therefore neither true nor false, or it affirms a most
unfounded, dangerous, illegal, and unconstitutional position. According to
this spiritual doctor of politics, if his Majesty does not owe his crown to
the choice of his people, he is no lawful king. Now nothing can be more
untrue than that the crown of this kingdom is so held by his Majesty.
Therefore, if you follow their rule, the king of Great Britain, who most
certainly does not owe his high office to any form of popular election, is
in no respect better than the rest of the gang of usurpers who reign, or
rather rob, all over the face of this our miserable world without any sort
of right or title to the allegiance of their people. The policy of this
general doctrine, so qualified, is evident enough. The propagators of this
political gospel are in hopes that their abstract principle (their
principle that a popular choice is necessary to the legal existence of the
sovereign magistracy) would be overlooked, whilst the king of Great Britain
was not affected by it. In the meantime the ears of their congregations
would be gradually habituated to it, as if it were a first principle
admitted without dispute. For the present it would only operate as a
theory, pickled in the preserving juices of pulpit eloquence, and laid by
for future use. Condo et compono quae mox depromere possim. By this policy,
whilst our government is soothed with a reservation in its favor, to which
it has no claim, the security which it has in common with all governments,
so far as opinion is security, is taken away.
Thus these politicians proceed whilst little notice is taken of their
doctrines; but when they come to be examined upon the plain meaning of
their words and the direct tendency of their doctrines, then equivocations
and slippery constructions come into play. When they say the king owes his
crown to the choice of his people and is therefore the only lawful
sovereign in the world, they will perhaps tell us they mean to say no more
than that some of the king's predecessors have been called to the throne by
some sort of choice, and therefore he owes his crown to the choice of his
people. Thus, by a miserable subterfuge, they hope to render their
proposition safe by rendering it nugatory. They are welcome to the asylum
they seek for their offense, since they take refuge in their folly. For if
you admit this interpretation, how does their idea of election differ from
our idea of inheritance?
And how does the settlement of the crown in the Brunswick line derived from
James the First come to legalize our monarchy rather than that of any of
the neighboring countries? At some time or other, to be sure, all the
beginners of dynasties were chosen by those who called them to govern.
There is ground enough for the opinion that all the kingdoms of Europe
were, at a remote period, elective, with more or fewer limitations in the
objects of choice. But whatever kings might have been here or elsewhere a
thousand years ago, or in whatever manner the ruling dynasties of England
or France may have begun, the king of Great Britain is, at this day, king
by a fixed rule of succession according to the laws of his country; and
whilst the legal conditions of the compact of sovereignty are performed by
him (as they are performed), he holds his crown in contempt of the choice
of the Revolution Society, who have not a single vote for a king amongst
them, either individually or collectively, though I make no doubt they
would soon erect themselves into an electoral college if things were ripe
to give effect to their claim. His Majesty's heirs and successors, each in
his time and order, will come to the crown with the same contempt of their
choice with which his Majesty has succeeded to that he wears.
Whatever may be the success of evasion in explaining away the gross error
of fact, which supposes that his Majesty (though he holds it in concurrence
with the wishes) owes his crown to the choice of his people, yet nothing
can evade their full explicit declaration concerning the principle of a
right in the people to choose; which right is directly maintained and
tenaciously adhered to. All the oblique insinuations concerning election
bottom in this proposition and are referable to it. Lest the foundation of
the king's exclusive legal title should pass for a mere rant of adulatory
freedom, the political divine proceeds dogmatically to assert [4] that, by
the principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three
fundamental rights, all which, with him, compose one system and lie
together in one short sentence, namely, that we have acquired a right:
(1) to choose our own governors.
(2) to cashier them for misconduct.
(3) to frame a government for ourselves.
This new and hitherto unheard-of bill of rights, though made in the name of
the whole people, belongs to those gentlemen and their faction only. The
body of the people of England have no share in it. They utterly disclaim
it. They will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives and
fortunes. They are bound to do so by the laws of their country made at the
time of that very Revolution which is appealed to in favor of the
fictitious rights claimed by the Society which abuses its name.
THESE GENTLEMEN OF THE OLD JEWRY, in all their reasonings on the Revolution
of 1688, have a revolution which happened in England about forty years
before and the late French revolution, so much before their eyes and in
their hearts that they are constantly confounding all the three together.
It is necessary that we should separate what they confound. We must recall
their erring fancies to the acts of the Revolution which we revere, for the
discovery of its true principles. If the principles of the Revolution of
1688 are anywhere to be found, it is in the statute called the Declaration
of Right. In that most wise, sober, and considerate declaration, drawn up
by great lawyers and great statesmen, and not by warm and inexperienced
enthusiasts, not one word is said, nor one suggestion made, of a general
right "to choose our own governors, to cashier them for misconduct, and to
form a government for ourselves".
This Declaration of Right (the act of the 1st of William and Mary, sess. 2,
ch. 2) is the cornerstone of our constitution as reinforced, explained,
improved, and in its fundamental principles for ever settled. It is called,
"An Act for declaring the rights and liberties of the subject, and for
settling the succession of the crown". You will observe that these rights
and this succession are declared in one body and bound indissolubly
together.
A few years after this period, a second opportunity offered for asserting a
right of election to the crown. On the prospect of a total failure of issue
from King William, and from the Princess, afterwards Queen Anne, the
consideration of the settlement of the crown and of a further security for
the liberties of the people again came before the legislature. Did they
this second time make any provision for legalizing the crown on the
spurious revolution principles of the Old Jewry? No. They followed the
principles which prevailed in the Declaration of Right, indicating with
more precision the persons who were to inherit in the Protestant line. This
act also incorporated, by the same policy, our liberties and an hereditary
succession in the same act. Instead of a right to choose our own governors,
they declared that the succession in that line (the Protestant line drawn
from James the First), was absolutely necessary "for the peace, quiet, and
security of the realm", and that it was equally urgent on them "to maintain
a certainty in the succession thereof, to which the subjects may safely
have recourse for their protection". Both these acts, in which are heard
the unerring, unambiguous oracles of revolution policy, instead of
countenancing the delusive, gipsy predictions of a "right to choose our
governors", prove to a demonstration how totally adverse the wisdom of the
nation was from turning a case of necessity into a rule of law.
Unquestionably, there was at the Revolution, in the person of King William,
a small and a temporary deviation from the strict order of a regular
hereditary succession; but it is against all genuine principles of
jurisprudence to draw a principle from a law made in a special case and
regarding an individual person. Privilegium non transit in exemplum. If
ever there was a time favorable for establishing the principle that a king
of popular choice was the only legal king, without all doubt it was at the
Revolution. Its not being done at that time is a proof that the nation was
of opinion it ought not to be done at any time. There is no person so
completely ignorant of our history as not to know that the majority in
parliament of both parties were so little disposed to anything resembling
that principle that at first they were determined to place the vacant
crown, not on the head of the Prince of Orange, but on that of his wife
Mary, daughter of King James, the eldest born of the issue of that king,
which they acknowledged as undoubtedly his. It would be to repeat a very
trite story, to recall to your memory all those circumstances which
demonstrated that their accepting King William was not properly a choice;
but to all those who did not wish, in effect, to recall King James or to
deluge their country in blood and again to bring their religion, laws, and
liberties into the peril they had just escaped, it was an act of necessity,
in the strictest moral sense in which necessity can be taken.
In the very act in which for a time, and in a single case, parliament
departed from the strict order of inheritance in favor of a prince who,
though not next, was, however, very near in the line of succession, it is
curious to observe how Lord Somers, who drew the bill called the
Declaration of Right, has comported himself on that delicate occasion. It
is curious to observe with what address this temporary solution of
continuity is kept from the eye, whilst all that could be found in this act
of necessity to countenance the idea of an hereditary succession is brought
forward, and fostered, and made the most of, by this great man and by the
legislature who followed him. Quitting the dry, imperative style of an act
of parliament, he makes the Lords and Commons fall to a pious, legislative
ejaculation and declare that they consider it "as a marvellous providence
and merciful goodness of God to this nation to preserve their said
Majesties' royal persons most happily to reign over us on the throne of
their ancestors, for which, from the bottom of their hearts, they return
their humblest thanks and praises". -- The legislature plainly had in view
the act of recognition of the first of Queen Elizabeth, chap. 3rd, and of
that of James the First, chap. 1st, both acts strongly declaratory of the
inheritable nature of the crown; and in many parts they follow, with a
nearly literal precision, the words and even the form of thanksgiving which
is found in these old declaratory statutes.
The two Houses, in the act of King William, did not thank God that they had
found a fair opportunity to assert a right to choose their own governors,
much less to make an election the only lawful title to the crown. Their
having been in a condition to avoid the very appearance of it, as much as
possible, was by them considered as a providential escape. They threw a
politic, well-wrought veil over every circumstance tending to weaken the
rights which in the meliorated order of succession they meant to
perpetuate, or which might furnish a precedent for any future departure
from what they had then settled forever. Accordingly, that they might not
relax the nerves of their monarchy, and that they might preserve a close
conformity to the practice of their ancestors, as it appeared in the
declaratory statutes of Queen Mary [5] and Queen Elizabeth, in the next
clause they vest, by recognition, in their Majesties all the legal
prerogatives of the crown, declaring "that in them they are most fully,
rightfully, and entirely invested, incorporated, united, and annexed". In
the clause which follows, for preventing questions by reason of any
pretended titles to the crown, they declare (observing also in this the
traditionary language, along with the traditionary policy of the nation,
and repeating as from a rubric the language of the preceding acts of
Elizabeth and James,) that on the preserving "a certainty in the SUCCESSION
thereof, the unity, peace, and tranquillity of this nation doth, under God,
wholly depend".
They knew that a doubtful title of succession would but too much resemble
an election, and that an election would be utterly destructive of the
"unity, peace, and tranquillity of this nation", which they thought to be
considerations of some moment. To provide for these objects and, therefore,
to exclude for ever the Old Jewry doctrine of "a right to choose our own
governors", they follow with a clause containing a most solemn pledge,
taken from the preceding act of Queen Elizabeth, as solemn a pledge as ever
was or can be given in favor of an hereditary succession, and as solemn a
renunciation as could be made of the principles by this Society imputed to
them: The Lords spiritual and temporal, and Commons, do, in the name of all
the people aforesaid, most humbly and faithfully submit themselves, their
heirs and posterities for ever; and do faithfully promise that they will
stand to maintain, and defend their said Majesties, and also the limitation
of the crown, herein specified and contained, to the utmost of their
powers, etc. etc.
So far is it from being true that we acquired a right by the Revolution to
elect our kings that, if we had possessed it before, the English nation did
at that time most solemnly renounce and abdicate it, for themselves and for
all their posterity forever. These gentlemen may value themselves as much
as they please on their whig principles, but I never desire to be thought a
better whig than Lord Somers, or to understand the principles of the
Revolution better than those, by whom it was brought about, or to read in
the Declaration of Right any mysteries unknown to those whose penetrating
style has engraved in our ordinances, and in our hearts, the words and
spirit of that immortal law.
It is true that, aided with the powers derived from force and opportunity,
the nation was at that time, in some sense, free to take what course it
pleased for filling the throne, but only free to do so upon the same
grounds on which they might have wholly abolished their monarchy and every
other part of their constitution. However, they did not think such bold
changes within their commission. It is indeed difficult, perhaps
impossible, to give limits to the mere abstract competence of the supreme
power, such as was exercised by parliament at that time, but the limits of
a moral competence subjecting, even in powers more indisputably sovereign,
occasional will to permanent reason and to the steady maxims of faith,
justice, and fixed fundamental policy, are perfectly intelligible and
perfectly binding upon those who exercise any authority, under any name or
under any title, in the state. The House of Lords, for instance, is not
morally competent to dissolve the House of Commons, no, nor even to
dissolve itself, nor to abdicate, if it would, its portion in the
legislature of the kingdom. Though a king may abdicate for his own person,
he cannot abdicate for the monarchy. By as strong, or by a stronger reason,
the House of Commons cannot renounce its share of authority. The engagement
and pact of society, which generally goes by the name of the constitution,
forbids such invasion and such surrender. The constituent parts of a state
are obliged to hold their public faith with each other and with all those
who derive any serious interest under their engagements, as much as the
whole state is bound to keep its faith with separate communities. Otherwise
competence and power would soon be confounded and no law be left but the
will of a prevailing force. On this principle the succession of the crown
has always been what it now is, an hereditary succession by law; in the old
line it was a succession by the common law; in the new, by the statute law
operating on the principles of the common law, not changing the substance,
but regulating the mode and describing the persons. Both these descriptions
of law are of the same force and are derived from an equal authority
emanating from the common agreement and original compact of the state,
communi sponsione reipublicae, and as such are equally binding on king and
people, too, as long as the terms are observed and they continue the same
body politic.
It is far from impossible to reconcile, if we do not suffer ourselves to be
entangled in the mazes of metaphysic sophistry, the use both of a fixed
rule and an occasional deviation: the sacredness of an hereditary principle
of succession in our government with a power of change in its application
in cases of extreme emergency. Even in that extremity (if we take the
measure of our rights by our exercise of them at the Revolution), the
change is to be confined to the peccant part only, to the part which
produced the necessary deviation; and even then it is to be effected
without a decomposition of the whole civil and political mass for the
purpose of originating a new civil order out of the first elements of
society.
A state without the means of some change is without the means of its
conservation. Without such means it might even risk the loss of that part
of the constitution which it wished the most religiously to preserve. The
two principles of conservation and correction operated strongly at the two
critical periods of the Restoration and Revolution, when England found
itself without a king. At both those periods the nation had lost the bond
of union in their ancient edifice; they did not, however, dissolve the
whole fabric. On the contrary, in both cases they regenerated the deficient
part of the old constitution through the parts which were not impaired.
They kept these old parts exactly as they were, that the part recovered
might be suited to them. They acted by the ancient organized states in the
shape of their old organization, and not by the organic moleculae of a
disbanded people. At no time, perhaps, did the sovereign legislature
manifest a more tender regard to that fundamental principle of British
constitutional policy than at the time of the Revolution, when it deviated
from the direct line of hereditary succession. The crown was carried
somewhat out of the line in which it had before moved, but the new line was
derived from the same stock. It was still a line of hereditary descent,
still an hereditary descent in the same blood, though an hereditary descent
qualified with Protestantism. When the legislature altered the direction,
but kept the principle, they showed that they held it inviolable.
On this principle, the law of inheritance had admitted some amendment in
the old time, and long before the era of the Revolution. Some time after
the Conquest, great questions arose upon the legal principles of hereditary
descent. It became a matter of doubt whether the heir per capita or the
heir per stirpes was to succeed; but whether the heir per capita gave way
when the heirdom per stirpes took place, or the Catholic heir when the
Protestant was preferred, the inheritable principle survived with a sort of
immortality through all transmigrations -- multosque per annos stat fortuna
domus, et avi numerantur avorum. This is the spirit of our constitution,
not only in its settled course, but in all its revolutions. Whoever came
in, or however he came in, whether he obtained the crown by law or by
force, the hereditary succession was either continued or adopted.
The gentlemen of the Society for Revolution see nothing in that of 1688 but
the deviation from the constitution; and they take the deviation from the
principle for the principle. They have little regard to the obvious
consequences of their doctrine, though they must see that it leaves
positive authority in very few of the positive institutions of this
country. 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. Do these theorists mean to
imitate some of their predecessors who dragged the bodies of our ancient
sovereigns out of the quiet of their tombs? Do they mean to attaint and
disable backward all the kings that have reigned before the Revolution, and
consequently to stain the throne of England with the blot of a continual
usurpation? Do they mean to invalidate, annul, or to call into question,
together with the titles of the whole line of our kings, that great body of
our statute law which passed under those whom they treat as usurpers, to
annul laws of inestimable value to our liberties -- of as great value at
least as any which have passed at or since the period of the Revolution? 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
these new doctors of the rights of men presume to assert that King James
the Second, who came to the crown as next of blood, according to the rules
of a then unqualified succession, was not to all intents and purposes a
lawful king of England before he had done any of those acts which were
justly construed into an abdication of his crown? If he was not, much
trouble in parliament might have been saved at the period these gentlemen
commemorate. But King James was a bad king with a good title, and not an
usurper. The princes who succeeded, according to the act of parliament
which settled the crown on the Electress Sophia and on her descendants,
being Protestants, came in as much by a title of inheritance as King James
did. He came in according to the law as it stood at his accession to the
crown; and the princes of the House of Brunswick came to the inheritance of
the crown, not by election, but by the law as it stood at their several
accessions of Protestant descent and inheritance, as I hope I have shown
sufficiently.
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 forever, could the legislature have
fastidiously rejected the fair and abundant choice which our 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?
The Princess Sophia was named in the act of 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 one only, because, says the act, "the most excellent
Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess Dowager of Hanover, is daughter of
the most excellent Princess Elizabeth, late Queen of 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 etc.,
etc., and the crown shall continue to the heirs of her body, being
Protestants." 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 crown our liberties can
be regularly perpetuated and preserved sacred as our hereditary right. An
irregular, convulsive movement may be necessary to throw off an irregular,
convulsive disease. But the course of 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 descendants of James the First, a due sense of the inconveniences 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 inconveniences 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
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 side of the water, to suffer ourselves to be
imposed upon by the counterfeit wares which some persons, by a double
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 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 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.
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 support of the just
principles of our constitution a task somewhat invidious. These sophisters
substitute a fictitious cause and feigned personages, in whose favor 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
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 conversant, 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 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, was, if it had any fault, rather too guarded
and too circumstantial. [6] But all this guard and all this accumulation of
circumstances serves to show 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 abandon themselves to violent
and extreme courses; it shows 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 be blown down with anything
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,
confirmed 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 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, [7] condemns very properly the practice of
gross, adulatory addresses to kings. Instead of this fulsome style, he
proposes that his Majesty should be told, on occasions of congratulation,
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, "Haec
commemoratio est quasi exprobatio". 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. I have seen very
assuming letters, signed "Your most obedient, humble servant". The proudest
denomination 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 unsavory 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.
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), anything like servants; the essence of whose
situation is to obey the commands of some other and to be removable at
pleasure. But the king of Great Britain obeys no other person; all other
persons are individually, and collectively 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 Babylonian 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 toward rendering him, as a
servant, in any degree responsible. Our constitution knows nothing of a
magistrate like the Justicia of Aragon, nor of any court legally appointed,
nor of any process legally settled, for submitting the king to the
responsibility 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
Revolution 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"
Ill 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 confusion. Let these gentlemen state who that representative
public is to whom they will affirm the king, as a servant, to be
responsible. It will then be 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. Governments 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 honorable 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 anything 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. Such a claim is as
ill-suited 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 horror. We wished at the period of the
Revolution, 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 cyon alien to the nature of the original plant.
All the reformations we have hitherto made have proceeded upon the
principle of reverence to antiquity; and I hope, nay, I am persuaded, that
all those which possibly may be made hereafter will be 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, [8] are industrious to prove the pedigree of our
liberties. They endeavor 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
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
powerful prepossession toward antiquity, with which the minds of all our
lawyers and legislators, and of all the people whom they wish to influence,
have been always filled, and the stationary policy of this kingdom in
considering their most sacred rights and franchises as an inheritance.
In the famous law of the 3rd 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 Englishmen, 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, recorded, 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 [9] into
their most 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 proceedings 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 and 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