such time as it may please the prince or people to revoke the trust; there being no other in this state who can do this; seeing that it was the people, through the instrumentality of your offices—­through you as its servants—­conferred on his Excellency, this power, authority, and government.  According to the common rule law, therefore, ‘quo jure quid statuitur, eodem jure tolli debet.’  You having been fully empowered by the provinces and cities, or, to speak more correctly, by your masters and superiors, to confer the government on his Excellency, it follows that you require a like power in order to take it away either in whole or in part.  If then you had no commission to curtail his authority, or even that of the state-council, and thus to tread upon and usurp his power as governor general and absolute, there follows of two things one:  either you did not well understand what you were doing, nor duly consider how far that power reached, or—­much more probably—­you have fallen into the sin of disobedience, considering how solemnly you swore allegiance to him.

Thus subtly and ably did Wilkes defend the authority of the man who had deserted his post at a most critical moment, and had compelled the States, by his dereliction, to take the government into their own hands.

For, after all, the whole argument of the English counsellor rested upon a quibble.  The people were absolutely sovereign, he said, and had lent that sovereignty to Leicester.  How had they made that loan?  Through the machinery of the States-General.  So long then as the Earl retained the absolute sovereignty, the States were not even representatives of the sovereign people.  The sovereign people was merged into one English Earl.  The English Earl had retired—­indefinitely—­to England.  Was the sovereign people to wait for months, or years, before it regained its existence?  And if not, how was it to reassert its vitality?  How but through the agency of the States-General, who—­according to Wilkes himself—­had been fully empowered by the Provinces and Cities to confer the government on the Earl?  The people then, after all, were the provinces and cities.  And the States-General were at that moment as much qualified to represent those provinces and cities as they ever had been, and they claimed no more.  Wilkes, nor any other of the Leicester party, ever hinted at a general assembly of the people.  Universal suffrage was not dreamed of at that day.  By the people, he meant, if he meant anything, only that very small fraction of the inhabitants of a country, who, according to the English system, in the reign of Elizabeth, constituted its Commons.  He chose, rather from personal and political motives than philosophical ones, to draw a distinction between the people and the States, but it is quite obvious, from the tone of his private communications, that by the ‘States’ he meant the individuals who happened, for the time-being, to be the deputies of the States of each Province.