by Edmund Burke

                                          IN A LETTER
                                 INTENDED TO HAVE BEEN SENT
                                   TO A GENTLEMAN IN PARIS
                                              [1790]

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.

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".* 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.

* Psalm CXLIX.

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,* 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.*(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.

* Discourse on the Love of our Country, Nov. 4, 1789, by Dr. Richard Price, 3d ed., pp. 17, 18.

*(2) "Those who dislike that mode of worship which is prescribed by public authority, ought, if they can find no worship out of
the church which they approve, to set up a separate worship for themselves; and by doing this, and giving an example of a
rational and manly worship, men of weight from their rank and literature may do the greatest service to society and the world".-
P 18, Dr. Price's Sermon.

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*
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.

* Discourse on the Love of our Country, by Dr. Price, p. 34.

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* 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".

* 1st Mary, sess. 3, ch. 1.

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.