h met and deliberated
without communication from the crown. What was still more important
was a vote of the parliament itself, authorising the passing of
letters patent under the great seal for opening parliament by
commission, and for giving assent to a Regency Bill. This was a
distinct usurpation of regal authority. Two members of the government
(in Rousseau's sense of the term), namely the houses of parliament,
usurped the power which they ought only to have exercised along with
the crown.[269] The Whigs denounced the proceeding as a fiction, a
forgery, a phantom, but if they had been readers of the Social
Contract, and if they had been bitten by its dogmatic temper, they
would have declared the compact of union violated, and all British
citizens free to resume their natural rights. Not even the bitter
virulence of faction at that time could tempt any politician to take
up such a line, though within half a dozen years each of the
democratic factions in France had worked at the overthrow of every
other in turn, on the very principle which Rousseau had formulated and
Robespierre had made familiar, that usurped authority is a valid
reason for annihilating a government, no matter under what
circumstances, nor how small the chance of replacing it by a better,
nor how enormous the peril to the national well-being in the process.
The true opposite to so anarchic a doctrine is assuredly not that of
passive obedience either to chamber or monarch, but the right and duty
of throwing off any government which inflicts more disadvantages than
it confers advantages. Rousseau's whole theory tends inevitably to
substitute a long series of struggles after phrases and shadows in the
new era, for the equally futile and equally bloody wars of dynastic
succession which have been the great curse of the old. Men die for a
phrase as they used to die for a family. The other theory, which all
English politicians accept in their hearts, and so many commanding
French politicians have seemed in their hearts to reject, was first
expounded in direct view of Rousseau's teaching by Paley.[270] Of
course the greatest, widest, and loftiest exposition of the bearings
of expediency on government and its conditions, is to be found in the
magnificent and immortal pieces of Burke, some of them suggested by
absolutist violations of the doctrine in our own affairs, and some of
them by anarchic violation of it in the affairs of France, after the
seed sown by R