attends the execution of
the most just and necessary decrees. They thought it no disparagement to
their royalty to be bound by them,--like unto God, who himself obeys the
laws he has preordained. ['A good government: where the people obey their
king and the king obeys the law'--Solon. D.W.] Ministers of State, who
are generally so blinded by the splendour of their fortune as never to be
content with what the laws allow, make it their business to overturn
them; and Cardinal de Richelieu laboured at it more constantly than any
other, and with equal application and imprudence.

God only is self-existent and independent; the most rightful monarchs and
established monarchies in the world cannot possibly be supported but by
the conjunction of arms and laws,--a union so necessary that the one
cannot subsist without the other. Laws without the protection of arms
sink into contempt, and arms which are not tempered by laws quickly turn
a State into anarchy. The Roman commonwealth being set aside by Julius
Caesar, the supreme power which was devolved upon his successors by force
of arms subsisted no longer than they were able to maintain the authority
of the laws; for as soon as the laws lost their force, the power of the
Roman Emperors vanished, and the very men that were their favourites,
having got possession of their seals and their arms, converted their
masters' substance into their own, and, as it were, sucked them dry under
the shelter of those repealed laws. The Roman Empire, formerly sold by
auction to the highest bidder, and the Turkish emperors, whose necks are
exposed every day to the bowstring, show us in very bloody characters the
blindness of those men that make authority to consist only in force.

But why need we go abroad for examples when we have so many at home?
Pepin, in dethroning the Merovingian family, and Capet, in dispossessing
the Carlovingians, made use of nothing else but the same power which the
ministers, their predecessors, had acquired under the authority of their
masters; and it is observable that the mayors of the Palace and the
counts of Paris placed themselves on the thrones of kings exactly by the
same methods that gained them their masters' favours,--that is, by
weakening and changing the laws of the land, which at first always
pleases weak princes, who fancy it aggrandises their power; but in its
consequence it gives a power to the great men and motives to the common
people to rebel against