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HISTORY OP ENGLAND.

ciiap. was immortal. The man might abdicate; but the magistratei68s. was irremovcablc. If, these politicians said, we once admiJthat the throne is vacant, we admit that it is elective. Thesovereign whom we may place on it will be a sovereign, notafter the English, but after the Polish, fashion. Even if wechoose the very person who would reign by right of birth,still that person will reign not by right of birth, but in virtueof our choice, and will take as a gift what ought to be regardedas an inheritance. That salutary reverence with which the bloodroyal and the order of primogeniture have hitherto been re-garded will be greatly diminished. Still more serious willthe evil be, if we not only fill the throne by election, but fillit with a prince who has doubtless the qualities of a great andgood ruler, and who has wrought a W’onderful deliverance forus, but who is not first nor even second in the order of suc-cession. If we once say that merit, however eminent, shallbe a title to the crown, we disturb the very foundations of ourpolity, and furnish a precedent of which every ambitiouswarrior or statesman who may have rendered any great ser-vice to the public will be tempted to avail himself. This dan-ger we avoid if we logically follow out the principles of theconstitution to their consequences. There has been a demiseof the crown. At the instant of the demise the next heirbecame our lawful sovereign. We consider the Princess ofOrange as next heir; and we hold that she ought, withoutany delay, to be proclaimed, what she already is, our Queen.

The Whigs replied that it was idle to apply ordinary rulesto a country in a state of revolution, that the great questionnow depending was not to be decided by the saws of pedanticTemplars, and that, if it were to be so decided, such sawsmight be quoted on one side as well as the other. If it werea legal maxim that the throne could never be vacant, it wasalso a legal maxim that a living man could have no heir. Jameswas still living. How then could the Princess of Orange behis heir? The truth was that the laws of England had madefull provision for the succession when the power of a sovereignand his natural life terminated together, but had made noprovison for the very rare cases in which his power terminated