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: