drawn up by great lawyers and
great statesmen, and not by warm and inexperienced enthusiasts, not one
word is said, nor one suggestion made, of a general right "to choose our
own _governors_, to cashier them for misconduct, and to _form_ a
government for _ourselves_."

This Declaration of Right (the act of the 1st of William and Mary, sess.
2, ch. 2) is the corner-stone of our Constitution, as reinforced,
explained, improved, and in its fundamental principles forever settled.
It is called "An act for declaring the rights and liberties of the
subject, and for _settling_ the _succession_ of the crown." You will
observe that these rights and this succession are declared in one body,
and bound indissolubly together.

A few years after this period, a second opportunity offered for
asserting a right of election to the crown. On the prospect of a total
failure of issue from King William, and from the princess, afterwards
Queen Anne, the consideration of the settlement of the Crown, and of a
further security for the liberties of the people, again came before the
legislature. Did they this second time make any provision for legalizing
the crown on the spurious Revolution principles of the Old Jewry? No.
They followed the principles which prevailed in the Declaration of
Right; indicating with more precision the persons who were to inherit in
the Protestant line. This act also incorporated, by the same policy, our
liberties and an hereditary succession in the same act. Instead of a
right to choose our own governors, they declared that the _succession_
in that line (the Protestant line drawn from James the First) was
absolutely necessary "for the peace, quiet, and security of the realm,"
and that it was equally urgent on them "to maintain a _certainty in the
succession_ thereof, to which the subjects may safely have recourse for
their protection." Both these acts, in which are heard the unerring,
unambiguous oracles of Revolution policy, instead of countenancing the
delusive gypsy predictions of a "right to choose our governors," prove
to a demonstration how totally adverse the wisdom of the nation was from
turning a case of necessity into a rule of law.

Unquestionably there was at the Revolution, in the person of King
William, a small and a temporary deviation from the strict order of a
regular hereditary succession; but it is against all genuine principles
of jurisprudence to draw a principle from a law made in a special case