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.[82] 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 their 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 contrast_ 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 first of King William,
sess. 2d, 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 "cashiering their governors."
Dr. Price, in this sermon,[83] 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, "_Hæc commemeratio est quasi exprobratio_." 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 domination that ever was
endured on earth took a title of still greater humility than that which
is now proposed for sovereigns by the Apostle of Liberty. Kings and
nations were trampled upon by the foot of one calling himself "The
Servant of Servants"; and mandates for deposing sovereigns were sealed
with the signet of "The Fisherman."
I should have considered all this as no more than a sort of flippant,
vain discourse, in which, as in an 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 we are to obey the law in him, our
Constitution has made no sort of provision towards rendering him, as a
servant, in any degree responsible. Our Constitution knows nothing of a
magistrate like the _Justicia_ of 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 be then time enough for me to
produce to them the positive statute law which affirms that he is not.
The ceremony of cashiering kings, of which these gentlemen talk so much
at their ease, can rarely, if ever, be performed without force. It then
becomes a case of war, and not of constitution. Laws are commanded to
hold their tongues amongst arms; and tribunals fall to the ground with
the peace they are no longer able to uphold. The Revolution of 1688 was
obtained by a just war, in the only case in which any war, and much more
a civil war, can be just. "_Justa bella quibus_ NECESSARIA." The
question of dethroning, or, if these gentlemen, like the phrase better,
"cashiering kings," will always be, as it has always been, an
extraordinary question of state, and wholly out of the law: a question
(like all other questions of state) of dispositions, and of means, and
of probable consequences, rather than of positive rights. As it was not
made for common abuses, so it is not to be agitated by common minds. The
speculative line of demarcation, where obedience ought to end and
resistance must begin, is faint, obscure, and not easily definable. It
is not a single act or a single event which determines it. 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 scion alien to the nature of the original plant. All the
reformations we have hitherto made have proceeded upon the principle of
reference to antiquity; and I hope, nay, I am 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,[84] 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 the First, 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 towards
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 the First, 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 Abbé Sièyes. 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[85] 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 kingdom, without any reference
whatever to any other more general or prior right. By this means our
Constitution preserves an unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We
have an inheritable crown, an inheritable peerage, and a House of
Commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties
from a long line of ancestors.
This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection,--or
rather the happy effect of following Nature, which is wisdom without
reflection, and above it. A spirit of innovation is generally the result
of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to
posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides, the
people of England well know that the idea of inheritance furnishes a
sure principle of conservation, and a sure principle of transmission,
without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves
acquisition free; but it secures what it acquires. Whatever advantages
are obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims are locked fast as in
a sort of family settlement, grasped as in a kind of mortmain forever.
By a constitutional policy working after the pattern of Nature, we
receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the
same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives.
The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of
Providence, are handed down to us, and from us, in the same course and
order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and
symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence
decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts,--wherein, by
the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great
mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is
never old or middle-aged or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable
constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall,
renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of Nature in
the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new, in
what we retain we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner
and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided, not by the
superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy.
In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the
image of a relation in blood: binding up the Constitution of our country
with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the
bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with
the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our
state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.
Through the same plan of a conformity to Nature in our artificial
institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful
instincts to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason,
we have derived several other, and those no small benefits, from
considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting
as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom,
leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful
gravity. This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of
habitual native dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence almost
inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers
of any distinction. By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom.
It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and
illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial. It
has its gallery of portraits, its monumental inscriptions, its records,
evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our civil institutions on
the principle upon which Nature teaches us to revere individual men: on
account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are
descended. All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to
preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have
pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our
breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and
magazines of our rights and privileges.
* * * * *
You might, if you pleased, have profited of our example, and have given
to your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity. Your privileges,
though discontinued, were not lost to memory. Your Constitution, it is
true, whilst you were out of possession, suffered waste and
dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls, and in all the
foundations, of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired
those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. Your
Constitution was suspended before it was perfected; but you had the
elements of a Constitution very nearly as good as could be wished. In
your old states you possessed that variety of parts corresponding with
the various descriptions of which your community was happily composed;
you had all that combination and all that opposition of interests, you
had that action and counteraction, which, in the natural and in the
political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws
out the harmony of the universe. These opposed and conflicting
interests, which you considered as so great a blemish in your old and in
our present Constitution, interpose a salutary check to all precipitate
resolutions. They render deliberation a matter, not of choice, but of
necessity; they make all change a subject of _compromise_, which
naturally begets moderation; they produce _temperaments_, preventing the
sore evil of harsh, crude, unqualified reformations, and rendering all
the headlong exertions of arbitrary power, in the few or in the many,
forever impracticable. Through that diversity of members and interests,
general liberty had as many securities as there were separate views in
the several orders; whilst by pressing down the whole by the weight of a
real monarchy, the separate parts would have been prevented from warping
and starting from their allotted places.