e given of
the full conviction of the British nation that the principles of the
Revolution did not authorize them to elect kings at their pleasure, and
without any attention to the ancient fundamental principles of our
government, than their continuing to adopt a plan of hereditary
Protestant succession in the old line, with all the dangers and all the
inconveniences of its being a foreign line full before their eyes, and
operating with the utmost force upon their minds.

A few years ago I should be ashamed to overload a matter so capable of
supporting itself by the then unnecessary support of any argument; but
this seditious, unconstitutional doctrine is now publicly taught,
avowed, and printed. The dislike I feel to revolutions, the signals for
which have so often been given from pulpits,--the spirit of change that
is gone abroad,--the total contempt which prevails with you, and may
come to prevail with us, of all ancient institutions, when set in
opposition to a present sense of convenience, or to the bent of a
present inclination,--all these considerations make it not unadvisable,
in my opinion, to call back our attention to the true principles of our
own domestic laws, that you, my French friend, should begin to know, and
that we should continue to cherish them. We ought not, on either side of
the water, to suffer ourselves to be imposed upon by the counterfeit
wares which some persons, by a double fraud, export to you in illicit
bottoms, as raw commodities of British growth, though wholly alien to
our soil, in order afterwards to smuggle them back again into this
country, manufactured after the newest Paris fashion of an improved
liberty.

The people of England will not ape the fashions they have never tried,
nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial. They
look upon the legal hereditary succession of their crown as among their
rights, not as among their wrongs,--as a benefit, not as a
grievance,--as a security for their liberty, not as a badge of
servitude. They look on the frame of their commonwealth, _such as it
stands_, to be of inestimable value; and they conceive the undisturbed
succession of the crown to be a pledge of the stability and perpetuity
of all the other members of our Constitution.

I shall beg leave, before I go any further, to take notice of some
paltry artifices which the abettors of election as the only lawful title
to the crown are ready to employ, in order to render