French during their revolution. That was
not the worst quality of such a doctrine. It made government
impossible, by basing the right or duty of resistance on a question
that could not be reached by positive evidence, but must always be
decided by an arbitrary interpretation of an arbitrarily imagined
document. The moderate proposition that resistance is lawful if a
government is a bad one, and if the people are strong enough to
overthrow it, and if their leaders have reason to suppose they can
provide a less bad one in its place, supplies tests that are capable
of application. Our own writers in favour of the doctrine of
resistance partly based their arguments upon the historic instances of
the Old Testament, and it is one of the most striking contributions of
Protestantism to the cause of freedom, that it sent people in an
admiring spirit to the history of the most rebellious nation that ever
existed, and so provided them in Hebrew insurgency with a corrective
for the too submissive political teaching of the Gospel. But these
writers have throughout a tacit appeal to expediency, as writers might
always be expected to have, who were really meditating on the
possibility of their principles being brought to the test of practice.
There can be no evidence possible, with a test so vague as the fact of
the rupture of a compact whose terms are authentically known to nobody
concerned. Speak of bad laws and good, wise administration or unwise,
just government or unjust, extravagant or economical, civically
elevating or demoralising; all these are questions which men may apply
themselves to settle with knowledge, and with a more or less definite
degree of assurance. But who can tell how he is to find out whether
sovereignty has been usurped, and the social compact broken? Was there
a usurpation of sovereignty in France not many years ago, when the
assumption of power by the prince was ratified by many millions of
votes?

The same case, we are told, namely, breach of the social compact and
restoration of natural liberty, occurs when the members of the
government usurp separately the power which they ought only to
exercise in a body.[268] Now this description applies very fairly to
the famous episode in our constitutional history, connected with
George the Third's first attack of madness in 1788. Parliament cannot
lawfully begin business without a declaration of the cause of summons
from the crown. On this occasion parliament bot