the will of a prevailing force. On this principle the succession of
the crown has always been what it now is, an hereditary succession
by law; in the old line it was a succession by the common law; in
the new, by the statute law operating on the principles of the
common law, not changing the substance, but regulating the mode and
describing the persons. Both these descriptions of law are of the same
force and are derived from an equal authority emanating from the
common agreement and original compact of the state, communi
sponsione reipublicae, and as such are equally binding on king and
people, too, as long as the terms are observed and they continue the
same body politic.

    It is far from impossible to reconcile, if we do not suffer
ourselves to be entangled in the mazes of metaphysic sophistry, the
use both of a fixed rule and an occasional deviation: the sacredness
of an hereditary principle of succession in our government with a
power of change in its application in cases of extreme emergency. Even
in that extremity (if we take the measure of our rights by our
exercise of them at the Revolution), the change is to be confined to
the peccant part only, to the part which produced the necessary
deviation; and even then it is to be effected without a
decomposition of the whole civil and political mass for the purpose of
originating a new civil order out of the first elements of society.

    A state without the means of some change is without the means of
its conservation. Without such means it might even risk the loss of
that part of the constitution which it wished the most religiously
to preserve. The two principles of conservation and correction
operated strongly at the two critical periods of the Restoration and
Revolution, when England found itself without a king. At both those
periods the nation had lost the bond of union in their ancient
edifice; they did not, however, dissolve the whole fabric. On the
contrary, in both cases they regenerated the deficient part of the old
constitution through the parts which were not impaired. They kept
these old parts exactly as they were, that the part recovered might be
suited to them. They acted by the ancient organized states in the
shape of their old organization, and not by the organic moleculae of a
disbanded people. At no time, perhaps, did the sovereign legislature
manifest a more tender regard to that fundamental principle of British
constitutional policy than at the time of the Revolution, when it
deviated from the direct line of hereditary succession. The crown
was carried somewhat out of the line in which it had before moved, but
the new line was derived from the same stock. It was still a line of
hereditary descent, still an hereditary descent in the same blood,
though an hereditary descent qualified with Protestantism. When the
legislature altered the direction, but kept the principle, they showed
that they held it inviolable.

    On this principle, the law of inheritance had admitted some
amendment in the old time, and long before the era of the
Revolution. Some time after the Conquest, great questions arose upon
the legal principles of hereditary descent. It became a matter of
doubt whether the heir per capita or the heir per stirpes was to
succeed; but whether the heir per capita gave way when the heirdom per
stirpes took place, or the Catholic heir when the Protestant was
preferred, the inheritable principle survived with a sort of
immortality through all transmigrations- multosque per annos stat
fortuna domus, et avi numerantur avorum. This is the spirit of our
constitution, not only in its settled course, but in all its
revolutions. Whoever came in, or however he came in, whether he
obtained the crown by law or by force, the hereditary succession was
either continued or adopted.

    The gentlemen of the Society for Revolution see nothing in that of
1688 but the deviation from the constitution; and they take the
deviation from the principle for the principle. They have little
regard to the obvious consequences of their doctrine, though they must
see that it leaves positive authority in very few of the positive
institutions of this country. When such an unwarrantable maxim is once
established, that no throne is lawful but the elective, no one act
of the princes who preceded this era of fictitious election can be
valid. Do these theorists mean to imitate some of their predecessors
who dragged the bodies of our ancient sovereigns out of the quiet of
their tombs? Do they mean to attaint and disable backward all the
kings that have reigned before the Revolution, and consequently to
stain the throne of England with the blot of a continual usurpation?
Do they mean to invalidate, annul, or to call into question,
together with the titles of the whole line of our kings, that great
body of our statute law which passed under those whom they treat as
usurpers, to annul laws of inestimable value to our liberties- of as
great value at least as any which have passed at or since the period
of the Revolution? If kings who did not owe their crown to the
choice of their people had no title to make laws, what will become
of the statute de tallagio non concedendo?- of the petition of right?-
of the act of habeas corpus? Do these new doctors of the rights of men
presume to assert that King James the Second, who came to the crown as
next of blood, according to the rules of a then unqualified
succession, was not to all intents and purposes a lawful king of
England before he had done any of those acts which were justly
construed into an abdication of his crown? If he was not, much trouble
in parliament might have been saved at the period these gentlemen
commemorate. But King James was a bad king with a good title, and
not an usurper. The princes who succeeded, according to the act of
parliament which settled the crown on the Electress Sophia and on
her descendants, being Protestants, came in as much by a title of
inheritance as King James did. He came in according to the law as it
stood at his accession to the crown; and the princes of the House of
Brunswick came to the inheritance of the crown, not by election, but
by the law as it stood at their several accessions of Protestant
descent and inheritance, as I hope I have shown sufficiently.