overeigns out of the quiet of their tombs? Do
they mean to attaint and disable backwards all the kings that have
reigned before the Revolution, and consequently to stain the throne of
England with the blot of a continual usurpation? Do they mean to
invalidate, annul, or to call into question, together with the titles of
the whole line of our kings, that great body of our statute law which
passed under those whom they treat as usurpers? to annul laws of
inestimable value to our liberties,--of as great value at least as any
which have passed at or since the period of the Revolution? If kings who
did not owe their crown to the choice of their people had no title to
make laws, what will become of the statute _De tallagio non concedendo?_
of the _Petition of Right?_ of the act of _Habeas Corpus?_ Do these new
doctors of the rights of men presume to assert that King James the
Second, who came to the crown as next of blood, according to the rules
of a then unqualified succession, was not to all intents and purposes a
lawful king of England, before he had done any of those acts which were
justly construed into an abdication of his crown? If he was not, much
trouble in Parliament might have been saved at the period these
gentlemen commemorate. But King James was a bad king with a good title,
and not an usurper. The princes who succeeded according to the act of
Parliament which settled the crown on the Electress Sophia and on her
descendants, being Protestants, came in as much by a title of
inheritance as King James did. He came in according to the law, as it
stood at his accession to the crown; and the princes of the House of
Brunswick came to the inheritance of the crown, not by election, but by
the law, as it stood at their several accessions, of Protestant descent
and inheritance, as I hope I have shown sufficiently.

The law by which this royal family is specifically destined to the
succession is the act of the 12th and 13th of King William. The terms of
this act bind "us, and our _heirs_, and our _posterity_, to them, their
_heirs_, and their _posterity_," being Protestants, to the end of time,
in the same words as the Declaration of Right had bound us to the heirs
of King William and Queen Mary. It therefore secures both an hereditary
crown and an hereditary allegiance. On what ground, except the
constitutional policy of forming an establishment to secure that kind of
succession which is to preclude a choice of the people f