Volume III Part 14 (1/2)

Multosque per annos Stat fortuna domus, et avi numerantur avorum.

This is the spirit of our Const.i.tution, 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 Revolutions see nothing in that of 1688 but the deviation from the Const.i.tution; and they take the deviation from the principle for the principle. They have little regard to the obvious consequences of their doctrine, though they may see that it leaves positive authority in very few of the positive inst.i.tutions 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 fict.i.tious 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 backwards 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 t.i.tles of the whole line of our kings, that great body of our statute law which pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed at or since the period of the Revolution? If kings who did not owe their crown to the choice of their people had no t.i.tle to make laws, what will become of the statute _De tallagio non concedendo?_ of the _Pet.i.tion of Right?_ of the act of _Habeas Corpus?_ Do these new doctors of the rights of men presume to a.s.sert 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 t.i.tle, 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 t.i.tle 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 const.i.tutional 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 own 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 t.i.tle 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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,” &c., &c.; ”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 Const.i.tution. 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, unconst.i.tutional 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 fas.h.i.+on of an improved liberty.

The people of England will not ape the fas.h.i.+ons 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 Const.i.tution.

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 t.i.tle to the crown are ready to employ, in order to render the support of the just principles of our Const.i.tution a task somewhat invidious. These sophisters subst.i.tute a fict.i.tious 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 circ.u.mstance, 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 cas.h.i.+ering their governors for _misconduct_.” Perhaps the apprehensions our ancestors entertained of forming such a precedent as that ”of cas.h.i.+ering 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 circ.u.mstantial.[82] But all this guard, and all this acc.u.mulation of circ.u.mstances, 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 mult.i.tude 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 Const.i.tution 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 const.i.tutional 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 const.i.tutional 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 ”cas.h.i.+ering 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, ”_Haec 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 a.s.suming letters signed, ”Your most obedient, humble servant.” The proudest domination that ever was endured on earth took a t.i.tle 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 ”cas.h.i.+ering 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 Const.i.tution, 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 Const.i.tution has made no sort of provision towards rendering him, as a servant, in any degree responsible. Our Const.i.tution 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 a.s.sert, in direct opposition to one of the wisest and most beautiful parts of our Const.i.tution, 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 cas.h.i.+ering 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 const.i.tution. 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, ”cas.h.i.+ering 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 a.s.serted 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_ const.i.tution of government which is our only security for law and liberty. If you are desirous of knowing the spirit of our Const.i.tution, 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 a.n.a.logical precedent, authority, and example.

Our oldest reformation is that of Magna Charta. You will see that Sir Edward c.o.ke, 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 _Pet.i.tion 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 Pet.i.tion 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_ t.i.tle 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 _a.s.serted 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 Const.i.tution to claim and a.s.sert 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 Const.i.tution 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 const.i.tutional 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 inst.i.tutions 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 superst.i.tion of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic a.n.a.logy.

In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood: binding up the Const.i.tution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cheris.h.i.+ng 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 n.o.ble freedom.