But while the position of the new government was thus rendered less secure, by narrowing the basis of public opinion whereon it stood, the liberal principles of policy which the whigs had espoused became incomparably more powerful, and were necessarily involved in the continuance of the revolution settlement. The ministers of William III. and of the house of Brunswick had no choice but to respect and countenance the doctrines of Locke, Hoadley, and Molesworth. The assertion of passive obedience to the Crown grew obnoxious to the Crown itself. Our new line of sovereigns scarcely ventured to hear of their hereditary right, and dreaded the cup of flattery that was drugged with poison. This was the greatest change that affected our monarchy by the fall of the house of Stuart. The laws were not so materially altered as the spirit and sentiments of the people. Hence those who look only at the former have been prone to underrate the magnitude of this revolution. The fundamental maxims of the constitution, both as they regard the king and the subject, may seem nearly the same; but the disposition with which they were received and interpreted was entirely different. _Its salutary consequences._--It was in this turn of feeling, in this change, if I may so say, of the heart, far more than in any positive statutes and improvements of the law, that I consider the revolution to have been eminently conducive to our freedom and prosperity. Laws and statutes as remedial, nay more closely limiting the prerogative than the bill of rights and act of settlement, might possibly have been obtained from James himself, as the price of his continuance on the throne, or from his family as that of their restoration to it. But what the revolution did for us was this; it broke the spell that had charmed the nation. It cut up by the roots all that theory of indefeasible right, of paramount prerogative, which had put the Crown in continual opposition to the people. A contention had now subsisted for five hundred years, but particularly during the four last reigns, against the aggressions of arbitrary power. The sovereigns of this country had never patiently endured the control of parliament; nor was it natural for them to do so, while the two houses of parliament appeared historically, and in legal language, to derive their existence as well as privileges from the Crown itself. They had at their side the pliant lawyers, who held the prerogative to be uncontrollable by statutes, a doctrine of itself destructive to any scheme of reconciliation and compromise between a king and his subjects; they had the churchmen, whose casuistry denied that the most intolerable tyranny could excuse resistance to a lawful government. These two propositions could not obtain general acceptation without rendering all national liberty precarious.