father exempt from those vices of a court to which the son was too long addicted; not so harsh perhaps or prone to severity in his temper, but inferior in general sincerity and adherence to his word. They were both equally unfitted for the condition in which they were meant to stand--the limited kings of a wise and free people, the chiefs of the English commonwealth. The most plausible argument against the necessity of so violent a remedy for public grievances as the abjuration of allegiance to a reigning sovereign, was one that misled half the nation in that age, and is still sometimes insinuated by those whose pity for the misfortunes of the house of Stuart appears to predominate over every other sentiment which the history of the revolution should excite. It was alleged that the constitutional mode of redress by parliament was not taken away; that the king's attempts to obtain promises of support from the electors and probable representatives showed his intention of calling one; that the writs were in fact ordered before the Prince of Orange's expedition; that after the invader had reached London, James still offered to refer the terms of reconciliation with his people to a free parliament, though he could have no hope of evading any that might be proposed; that by reversing illegal judgments, by annulling unconstitutional dispensations, by reinstating those who had been unjustly dispossessed, by punishing wicked advisers, above all, by passing statutes to restrain the excesses and cut off the dangerous prerogatives of the monarchy (as efficacious, or more so, than the bill of rights and other measures that followed the revolution), all risk of arbitrary power, or of injury to the established religion, might have been prevented without a violation of that hereditary right which was as fundamental in the constitution as any of the subject's privileges. It was not necessary to enter upon the delicate problem of absolute non-resistance, or to deny that the conservation of the whole was paramount to all positive laws. The question to be proved was, that a regard to this general safety exacted the means employed in the revolution, and constituted that extremity which could alone justify such a deviation from the standard rules of law and religion.