perate, not only independently, but in spite of man,--or as if it were
a thing or a subject universally consented to. Alas! it has none of
those properties, but is the reverse of them all. It is a thing in
imagination, the propriety of which is more than doubted, and the
legality of which in a few years will be denied."

"If I ask the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and
down through all the occupations of life to the common laborer, what
service monarchy is to him, he can give me no answer. If I ask him what
monarchy is, he believes it is something like a sinecure."

"The French Constitution says, that the right of war and peace is in the
nation. Where else should it reside, but in those who are to pay the
expense?

"In England, this right is said to reside in a _metaphor_, shown at the
Tower for sixpence or a shilling apiece: so are the lions; and it would
be a step nearer to reason to say it resided in them, for any inanimate
metaphor is no more than a hat or a cap. We can all see the absurdity of
worshipping Aaron's molten calf, or Nebuchadnezzar's golden image; but
why do men continue to practise themselves the absurdities they despise
in others?"

The Revolution and Hanover succession had been objects of the highest
veneration to the old Whigs. They thought them not only proofs of the
sober and steady spirit of liberty which guided their ancestors, but of
their wisdom and provident care of posterity. The modern Whigs have
quite other notions of these events and actions. They do not deny that
Mr. Burke has given truly the words of the acts of Parliament which
secured the succession, and the just sense of them. They attack not him,
but the law.

"Mr Burke" (say they) "has done some service, not to his cause, but to
his country, by bringing those clauses into public view. They serve to
demonstrate how necessary it is at all times to watch against the
attempted encroachment of power, and to prevent its running to excess.
It is somewhat extraordinary, that the offence for which James the
Second was expelled, that of setting up power by _assumption_, should be
re-acted, under another shape and form, by the Parliament that expelled
him. It shows that the rights of man were but imperfectly understood at
the Revolution; for certain it is, that the right which that Parliament
set up by _assumption_ (for by delegation it had it not, and could not
have it, because none could give it) over the person