ry
subsisting and contracting authority, but might rescind its acts and
obligations at pleasure? This would be a doctrine made to perpetuate and
exasperate war; and on that principle it directly impugns the law of
nations, which is built upon this principle, that war should be softened
as much as possible, and that it should cease as soon as possible,
between contending parties and communities. The king has a power to
pardon individuals. If the king holds out his faith to a robber, to come
in on a promise of pardon, of life and estate, and, in all respects, of
a full indemnity, shall the Parliament say that he must nevertheless be
executed, that his estate must be forfeited, or that he shall be
abridged of any of the privileges which he before held as a subject?
Nobody will affirm it. In such a case, the breach of faith would not
only be on the part of the king who assented to such an act, but on the
part of the Parliament who made it. As the king represents the whole
contracting capacity of the nation, so far as his prerogative
(unlimited, as I said before, by any precedent law) can extend, he acts
as the national procurator on all such occasions. What is true of a
robber is true of a rebel; and what is true of one robber or rebel is as
true, and it is a much more important truth, of one hundred thousand.

To urge this part of the argument further is, indeed, I fear, not
necessary, for two reasons: first, that it seems tolerably evident in
itself; and next, that there is but too much ground to apprehend that
the actual ratification of Parliament would, in the then temper of
parties, have proved but a very slight and trivial security. Of this
there is a very strong example in the history of those very articles:
for, though the Parliament omitted in the reign of King William to
ratify the first and most general of them, they did actually confirm the
second and more limited, that which related to the security of the
inhabitants of those five counties which were in arms when the treaty
was made.

CHAPTER IV.

In the foregoing book we considered these laws in a very simple point of
view, and in a very general one,--merely as a system of hardship
imposed on the body of the community; and from thence, and from some
other arguments, inferred the general injustice of such a procedure. In
this we shall be obliged to be more minute; and the matter will become
more complex as we undertake to demonstrate the mischievous