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.

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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.