express purpose of stating the true
grounds and principles of the Revolution,--what the Commons emphatically
called their _foundation_. It was carried on for the purpose of
condemning the principles on which the Revolution was first opposed and
afterwards calumniated, in order, by a juridical sentence of the highest
authority, to confirm and fix Whig principles, as they had operated both
in the resistance to King James and in the subsequent settlement, and to
fix them in the extent and with the limitations with which it was meant
they should be understood by posterity. The ministers and managers for
the Commons were persons who had, many of them, an active share in the
Revolution. Most of them had seen it at an age capable of reflection.
The grand event, and all the discussions which led to it and followed
it, were then alive in the memory and conversation of all men. The
managers for the Commons must be supposed to have spoken on that subject
the prevalent ideas of the leading party in the Commons, and of the Whig
ministry. Undoubtedly they spoke also their own private opinions; and
the private opinions of such men are not without weight. They were not
_umbratiles doctores_, men who had studied a free Constitution only in
its anatomy and upon dead systems. They knew it alive and in action.

In this proceeding the Whig principles, as applied to the Revolution and
Settlement, are to be found, or they are to be found nowhere. I wish the
Whig readers of this Appeal first to turn to Mr. Burke's Reflections,
from page 20 to page 50,[13] and then to attend to the following
extracts from the trial of Dr. Sacheverell. After this, they will
consider two things: first, whether the doctrine in Mr. Burke's
Reflections be consonant to that of the Whigs of that period; and,
secondly, whether they choose to abandon the principles which belonged
to the progenitors of some of them, and to the predecessors of them all,
and to learn new principles of Whiggism, imported from France, and
disseminated in this country from Dissenting pulpits, from Federation
societies, and from the pamphlets, which (as containing the political
creed of those synods) are industriously circulated in all parts of the
two kingdoms. This is their affair, and they will make their option.

These new Whigs hold that the sovereignty, whether exercised by one or
many, did not only originate _from_ the people, (a position not denied
nor worth denying or assenting to,) b