several persons are apparent improvements made upon what began in that unlimited power. This is what seems reasonable to common sense, and the manner of maintaining absolute dominion in one person, wherever it subsists, verifies the observation; for the subjection of the people to such authority is supported only by terrors, sudden and private executions and imprisonments, and not, as with happy Britons, by the judgment, in cases of liberty and property, of the peers and neighbours of men accused or prosecuted. This absolute power in one person as it is generally exercised is not indeed government, but at best clandestine tyranny, supported by the confederates, or rather favourite slaves, of the tyrant.

I was glad to find this natural sense of power confirmed in me by very great and good men, who have made government, and the principles on which it is founded, their professed study and meditation.

A very celebrated author has these words :—

"The case of man's nature standing as it does, some kind of regiment the law of nature doth require; yet the kinds thereof being many, nature tieth not to any one, but leaveth the choice as a thing arbitrary. At the first, when some certain kind of regiment was once approved, it may be that nothing was then further thought upon for the manner of governing, but all permitted unto their

wisdom and discretion which were to rule, till by experience they found this for all parts very inconvenient, so as the thing which they had devised for a remedy did indeed but increase the sore which it should have cured. They saw that to live by one man's will became the cause of all men's misery. This constrained them to come unto laws, wherein all men might see their duties beforehand, and know the penalties of transgressing them. Men always knew that when force and injury was offered, they might be defenders of themselves; they knew that, howsoever men might seek their own commodity, yet if this were done with injury to others it was not to be suffered, but by all men and by all good means to be withstood.

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Finally, they knew that no man might in reason take upon him to determine his own right, and according to his own his own determination proceed in maintenance thereof, inasmuch as every man is towards himself, and them whom he greatly affecteth, partial; and therefore that strifes and troubles would be endless, except they have their common consent all to be ordered by some whom they should agree upon.'

Mr Stanhope, in defence of resistance in cases of extreme necessity, cites this memorable passage from Grotius:

"If the king hath one part of the supreme power, and the other part is in the senate or people, when

such a king shall invade that part that doth not belong to him, it shall be lawful to oppose a just force to him, because his power does not extend so far; which position I hold to be true, even though the power of making war should be vested only in the king, which must be understood to relate only to foreign war; for, as for home, it is impossible for any to have a share of the supreme power and not to have likewise a right to defend that share."

An eminent divine, who deserves all honour for the obligations he has laid upon both Church and State by his writings on the subject of government, argues against unlimited power thus :—

"The question is, whether the power of the civil magistrate be unlimited—that is, in other words, whether the nature of his office require it to be so. But what? Is it the end of that office that one particular person may do what he pleaseth without restraint, or that society should be made happy and secure? Who will say the former? And if the latter be the true end of it, a less power than absolute will answer it-nay, an absolute power is a power to destroy that end, and therefore inconsistent with the end itself."

These passages I thought fit to produce by way of preface to the following discourse, as carrying in them the reason and foundation of government itself and in maintenance of what passed at the Revolution.

I shall only beg leave to add to them one very great living authority, the present Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain, who, in a late famous trial, did openly, before Queen, Lords, and Commons, maintain the lawfulness of the Revolution under the notion of resistance, and assert, before the most solemn and august assembly of Europe, that there are extraordinary cases, cases of necessity, which are implied, though not expressed, in the generai rule— that is, which are so plain and so open to the common sense of mankind that, even whilst you are declaring resistance in all cases to be unlawful, you are of necessity understood to mean that resistance in some cases is lawful. I am pleased to observe, that no one ever put the matter so strongly, or carried it so high as this great man did upon that critical occasion. At the same time he was so just to his country as to declare that such a case undoubtedly the Revolution was, when our late unhappy sovereign then upon the throne, misled by evil counsellors, endeavoured to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of the kingdom.

It is every man's duty to correct the extravagances of his will, in order to enjoy life as becomes a rational being; but we cannot possess our souls with pleasure and satisfaction except we preserve to ourselves that inestimable blessing which we call liberty. By liberty I desire to be understood to mean the happiness of men's living under laws of their own making, by their personal consent or that of their representatives.

Without this the distinctions amongst mankind are but gentler degrees of misery; for as the true life of man consists in conducting it according to his own just sentiments and innocent inclinations, his being is degraded below that of a free agent, which Heaven has made him, when his affections and passions are no longer governed by the dictates of his own mind and the interests of human society, but by the arbitrary unrestrained will of another.

Without liberty, even health and strength, and all the advantages bestowed on us by Nature and Provi