eign
in Leaphigh. It requires no more than the rights of primogeniture,
sufficient discretion to understand the distinction between reigning and
governing, and a political moderation that is unlikely to derange the
balance of the state. But it is quite a different thing to govern.
His majesty is required to govern nothing, the slight interests just
mentioned excepted; no, not even himself. The case is far otherwise with
his first-cousin. This high functionary is charged with the important
trust of governing. It had been found, in the early ages of the
monarchy, that one conscience, or indeed one set of faculties generally,
scarcely sufficed for him whose duty it was both to reign and to govern.
We all know, my lords, how insufficient for our personal objects are
our own private faculties; how difficult we find it to restrain even
ourselves, assisted merely by our own judgments, consciences, and
memories; and in this fact do we perceive the great importance of
investing him who governs others, with an additional set of these grave
faculties. Under a due impression of the exigency of such a state of
things, the common law--not statute law, my lords, which is apt to be
tainted with the imperfections of monikin reason in its isolated or
individual state, usually bearing the impress of the single cauda from
which it emanated--but the common law, the known receptacle of all the
common sense of the nation--in such a state of things, then, has the
common law long since decreed that his majesty's first-cousin should
be the keeper of his majesty's conscience; and, by necessary legal
implication, endowed with his majesty's judgment, his majesty's reason,
and finally, his majesty's memory.

"My lords, this is the legal presumption. It would, in addition, be
easy for me to show, in a thousand facts, that not only the sovereign of
Leaphigh, but most other sovereigns, are and ever have been, destitute
of the faculty of a memory. It might be said to be incompatible with the
royal condition to be possessed of this obtrusive faculty. Were a prince
endowed with a memory, he might lose sight of his high estate, in the
recollection that he was born, and that he is destined, like another,
to die; he might be troubled with visions of the past; nay, the
consciousness of his very dignity might be unsettled and weakened by
a vivid view of the origin of his royal race. Promises, obligations,
attachments, duties, principles, and even debts, might