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.

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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