The law by which this royal family is specifically destined to the
succession is the act of the 12th and 13th of King William. The
terms of this act bind "us and our heirs, and our posterity, to
them, their heirs, and their posterity", being Protestants, to the end
of time, in the same words as the Declaration of Right had bound us to
the heirs of King William and Queen Mary. It therefore secures both an
hereditary crown and an hereditary allegiance. On what ground,
except the constitutional policy of forming an establishment to secure
that kind of succession which is to preclude a choice of the people
forever, could the legislature have fastidiously rejected the fair and
abundant choice which our country presented to them and searched in
strange lands for a foreign princess from whose womb the line of our
future rulers were to derive their title to govern millions of men
through a series of ages?

    The Princess Sophia was named in the act of settlement of the 12th
and 13th of King William for a stock and root of inheritance to our
kings, and not for her merits as a temporary administratrix of a power
which she might not, and in fact did not, herself ever exercise. She
was adopted for one reason, and for one only, because, says the act,
"the most excellent Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess Dowager
of Hanover, is daughter of the most excellent Princess Elizabeth, late
Queen of Bohemia, daughter of our late sovereign lord King James the
First, of happy memory, and is hereby declared to be the next in
succession in the Protestant line etc., etc., and the crown shall
continue to the heirs of her body, being Protestants." This limitation
was made by parliament, that through the Princess Sophia an
inheritable line not only was to be continued in future, but (what
they thought very material) that through her it was to be connected
with the old stock of inheritance in King James the First, in order
that the monarchy might preserve an unbroken unity through all ages
and might be preserved (with safety to our religion) in the old
approved mode by descent, in which, if our liberties had been once
endangered, they had often, through all storms and struggles of
prerogative and privilege, been preserved. They did well. No
experience has taught us that in any other course or method than
that of an hereditary crown our liberties can be regularly perpetuated
and preserved sacred as our hereditary right. An irregular, convulsive
movement may be necessary to throw off an irregular, convulsive
disease. But the course of succession is the healthy habit of the
British constitution. Was it that the legislature wanted, at the act
for the limitation of the crown in the Hanoverian line, drawn
through the female descendants of James the First, a due sense of
the inconveniences of having two or three, or possibly more,
foreigners in succession to the British throne? No!- they had a due
sense of the evils which might happen from such foreign rule, and more
than a due sense of them. But a more decisive proof cannot be given of
the full conviction of the British nation that the principles of the
Revolution did not authorize them to elect kings at their pleasure,
and without any attention to the ancient fundamental principles of our
government, than their continuing to adopt a plan of hereditary
Protestant succession in the old line, with all the dangers and all
the inconveniences of its being a foreign line full before their
eyes and operating with the utmost force upon their minds.

    A few years ago I should be ashamed to overload a matter so
capable of supporting itself by the then unnecessary support of any
argument; but this seditious, unconstitutional doctrine is now
publicly taught, avowed, and printed. The dislike I feel to
revolutions, the signals for which have so often been given from
pulpits; the spirit of change that is gone abroad; the total
contempt which prevails with you, and may come to prevail with us,
of all ancient institutions when set in opposition to a present
sense of convenience or to the bent of a present inclination: all
these considerations make it not unadvisable, in my opinion, to call
back our attention to the true principles of our own domestic laws;
that you, my French friend, should begin to know, and that we should
continue to cherish them. We ought not, on either side of the water,
to suffer ourselves to be imposed upon by the counterfeit wares
which some persons, by a double fraud, export to you in illicit
bottoms as raw commodities of British growth, though wholly alien to
our soil, in order afterwards to smuggle them back again into this
country, manufactured after the newest Paris fashion of an improved
liberty.

    The people of England will not ape the fashions they have never
tried, nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on
trial. They look upon the legal hereditary succession of their crown
as among their rights, not as among their wrongs; as a benefit, not as
a grievance; as a security for their liberty, not as a badge of
servitude. They look on the frame of their commonwealth, such as it
stands, to be of inestimable value, and they conceive the
undisturbed succession of the crown to be a pledge of the stability
and perpetuity of all the other members of our constitution.

    I shall beg leave, before I go any further, to take notice of some
paltry artifices which the abettors of election, as the only lawful
title to the crown, are ready to employ in order to render the support
of the just principles of our constitution a task somewhat
invidious. These sophisters substitute a fictitious cause and
feigned personages, in whose favor they suppose you engaged whenever
you defend the inheritable nature of the crown. It is common with them
to dispute as if they were in a conflict with some of those exploded
fanatics of slavery, who formerly maintained what I believe no
creature now maintains, "that the crown is held by divine hereditary
and indefeasible right".- These old fanatics of single arbitrary power
dogmatized as if hereditary royalty was the only lawful government
in the world, just as our new fanatics of popular arbitrary power
maintain that a popular election is the sole lawful source of