law was superseded
in favor of the substance of liberty. To the free choice, therefore, of
the people, without either King or Parliament, we owe that happy
establishment out of which both King and Parliament were regenerated.
From that great principle of liberty have originated the statutes
confirming and ratifying the establishment from which your Majesty
derives your right to rule over us. Those statutes have not given us
our liberties: our liberties have produced them. Every hour of your
Majesty's reign, your title stands upon the very same foundation on
which it was at first laid; and we do not know a better on which it can
possibly be placed.

Convinced, Sir, that you cannot have different rights and a different
security in different parts of your dominions, we wish to lay an even
platform for your throne, and to give it an unmovable stability, by
laying it on the general freedom of your people, and by securing to your
Majesty that confidence and affection in all parts of your dominions
which makes your best security and dearest title in this the chief seat
of your empire.

Such, Sir, being, amongst us, the foundation of monarchy itself, much
more clearly and much more peculiarly is it the ground of all
Parliamentary power. Parliament is a security provided for the
protection of freedom, and not a subtile fiction, contrived to amuse the
people in its place. The authority of both Houses can still less than
that of the crown be supported upon different principles in different
places, so as to be for one part of your subjects a protector of
liberty, and for another a fund of despotism, through which prerogative
is extended by occasional powers, whenever an arbitrary will finds
itself straitened by the restrictions of law. Had it seemed good to
Parliament to consider itself as the indulgent guardian and strong
protector of the freedom of the subordinate popular assemblies, instead
of exercising its powers to their annihilation, there is no doubt that
it never could have been their inclination, because not their interest,
to raise questions on the extent of Parliamentary rights, or to
enfeeble privileges which were the security of their own. Powers evident
from necessity, and not suspicious from an alarming mode or purpose in
the exertion, would, as formerly they were, be cheerfully submitted to;
and these would have been fully sufficient for conservation of unity in
the empire, and for directing its wealth to one co