Privilegium non transit in exemplum.
If ever there was a time favourable for establishing the principle, that
a king of popular choice was the only legal king, without all doubt it
was at the Revolution. Its not being done at that time is a proof that
the nation was of opinion it ought not to be done at any time. There is
no person so completely ignorant of our history as not to know that the
majority in parliament of both parties were so little disposed to
anything resembling that principle, that at first they were determined
to place the vacant crown, not on the head of the prince of Orange, but
on that of his wife Mary, daughter of King James, the eldest born of the
issue of that king, which they acknowledged as undoubtedly his. It would
be to repeat a very trite story, to recall to your memory all those
circumstances which demonstrated that their accepting King William was
not properly a CHOICE; but to all those who did not wish, in effect, to
recall King James, or to deluge their country in blood, and again to
bring their religion, laws, and liberties into the peril they had just
escaped, it was an act of NECESSITY, in the strictest moral sense in
which necessity can be taken.
So far is it from being true, that we acquired a right by the Revolution
to elect our kings, that if we had possessed it before, the English
nation did at that time most solemnly renounce and abdicate it, for
themselves, and for all their posterity for ever.
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