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