OUNTABLE TO NONE; while Sir James Montgomery and
Sir John Dalrymple, who conducted the debate on the other side,
averred that the Parliament was neither competent to grant, nor the
king to acquire, _an absolute power, irreconcilable with the_
RECIPROCAL OBLIGATIONS DUE TO THE PEOPLE.' The doctrines of Buchanan
prevailed; and the estates declared that James VII. having, through
'_the advice of evil and wicked councillors_, invaded the fundamental
constitution of the kingdom, and altered it from a legal limited
monarchy to an arbitrary despotic power,' he had thereby _forfaulted_
his right to the crown.' The terms of the declaration demonstrate that
Baillie was quite in the right regarding the 'old maxime, that the
king can do no fault,' as exclusively a 'maxime of the State of
England.' By acting on the advice of 'evil and wicked councillors,' it
was declared that a peccable king had forfeited the throne. The fact
that there were councillors in the case did not so much even as
extenuate the offence: it was the advisers of the King who then, as
now, were accountable to the King's English subjects for the advice
they gave; it was the King in person who was accountable to his
Scottish subjects for the advice he took. This principle, hitherto
little adverted to, throws, as we have said, much light on the history
of the Revolution in Scotland.

FIRST PRINCIPLES.

There is a passage in the _Life of Sir Matthew Hale_ which has
struck us as not only interesting in itself, from the breadth and
rectitude of judgment which it discloses, but also from the very
direct bearing of the principle involved in it on some of the recent
interdicts of the Supreme Civil Court. It serves to throw a kind of
historic light, if we may so speak, on the judicial talent of our
country in the present age as exhibited by the majority of our judges
of the Court of Session--such a light as the ecclesiastical
historian of a century hence will be disposed to survey it in, when
coolly exercising his judgment on the present eventful struggle.
One of not the least prominent nor least remarkable features of the
Rebellion of 1745, says a shrewd chronicler of this curious portion of
our history, was an utter destitution of military talent among the
general officers of the British army. And the time is in all
probability not very distant, in which the extreme lack of judicial
genius betrayed by our courts of law in their present collision
with the cour