The other Whig managers regarded (as he did) the overturning of the monarchy by a republican faction with the very same horror and detestation with which they regarded the destruction of the privileges of the people by an arbitrary monarch.

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Mr. Lechmere,

[Sidenote:  Constitution recovered at the Restoration and Revolution.]

Speaking of our Constitution, states it as “a Constitution which happily recovered itself, at the Restoration, from the confusions and disorders which the horrid and detestable proceedings of faction and usurpation had thrown it into, and which after many convulsions and struggles was providentially saved at the late happy Revolution, and by the many good laws passed since that time stands now upon a firmer foundation, together with the most comfortable prospect of security to all posterity by the settlement of the crown in the Protestant line.”

* * * * *

I mean now to show that the Whigs (if Sir Joseph Jekyl was one, and if he spoke in conformity to the sense of the Whig House of Commons, and the Whig ministry who employed him) did carefully guard against any presumption that might arise from the repeal of the non-resistance oath of Charles the Second, as if at the Revolution the ancient principles of our government were at all changed, or that republican doctrines were countenanced, or any sanction given to seditious proceedings upon general undefined ideas of misconduct, or for changing the form of government, or for resistance upon any other ground than the necessity so often mentioned for the purpose of self-preservation.  It will show still more clearly the equal care of the then Whigs to prevent either the regal power from being swallowed up on pretence of popular rights, or the popular rights from being destroyed on pretence of regal prerogatives.

* * * * *

Sir Joseph Jekyl.

[Sidenote:  Mischief of broaching antimonarchical principles.]

[Sidenote:  Two cases of resistance:  one to preserve the crown, the other the rights of the subject.]

“Further, I desire it may be considered, these legislators” (the legislators who framed the non-resistance oath of Charles the Second) “were guarding against the consequences of those pernicious and antimonarchical principles which had been broached a little before in this nation, and those large declarations in favor of non-resistance were made to encounter or obviate the mischief of those principles,—­as appears by the preamble to the fullest of those acts, which is the Militia Act, in the 13th and 14th of King Charles the Second.  The words of that act are these:  And during the late usurped governments, many evil and rebellious principles have been instilled into the minds of the people of this kingdom, which may