king, will as naturally act as they would do in the case of any other property, and consent to the loss or annihilation of any part of it, for the purpose of preserving the remainder to him whom they style the rightful owner.  If the people be the sovereign and the king the delegate, it is better to change the bailiff than to injure the farm; but if the king be the proprietor, it is better the farm should be impaired—­nay, part of it destroyed—­than that the whole should pass over to an usurper.  The royal prerogative ought, according to the Whigs (not in the case of a popish successor only, but in all cases), to be reduced to such powers as are in their exercise beneficial to the people; and of the benefit of these they will not rashly suffer the people to be deprived, whether the executive power be in the hands of an hereditary or of an elected king, of a regent, or of any other denomination of magistrate; while, on the other hand, they who consider prerogative with reference only to royalty, will, with equal readiness, consent either to the extension or the suspension of its exercise, as the occasional interests of the prince may seem to require.  The senseless plea of a divine and indefeasible right in James, which even the legislature was incompetent to set aside, though as inconsistent with the declarations of parliament in the statute book, and with the whole practice of the English constitution, as it is repugnant to nature and common sense, was yet warmly insisted upon by the high church party.  Such an argument, as might naturally be expected, operated rather to provoke the Whigs to perseverance than to dissuade them from their measure:  it was, in their eyes, an additional merit belonging to the exclusion bill that it strengthened, by one instance more, the authority of former statutes in reprobating a doctrine which seems to imply that man can have a property in his fellow-creatures.  By far the best argument in favour of the restrictions, is the practical one that they could be obtained, and that the exclusion could not; but the value of this argument is chiefly proved by the event.  The exclusionists had a fair prospect of success, and their plan being clearly the best, they were justified in pursuing it.

The spirit of resistance which the king showed in the instance of the militia and the exclusion bills, seems to have been systematically confined to those cases where he supposed his power to be more immediately concerned.  In the prosecution of the aged and innocent Lord Stafford, he was so far from interfering in behalf of that nobleman, that many of those most in his confidence, and, as it is affirmed, the Duchess of Portsmouth herself, openly favoured the prosecution.  Even after the dissolution of him last parliament, when he had so far subdued his enemies as to be no longer under any apprehensions from them, he did not think it worth while to save the life of Plunket, the popish Archbishop of Armagh, of whose innocence