After the dramatic intervention of the Marquis de Breze, the king's speech of June 23 was never seriously considered by the Assembly. Yet the concessions, which it made to the spirit of political progress, satisfied philosophic observers, and there had been no time in English history where changes so extensive, proceeding from the Crown, would have failed to conciliate the people. It was a common belief in those days, expressly sanctioned by the Economists, that secondary liberties, carried far enough, are worth more than formal securities for the principle of self-government. One is of daily use and practical advantage; the other is of the domain of theory, dubiously beneficial, and without assurance of enlightenment and justice. A wise, honest, and intelligent administration gives more to men than the established reign of uncertain opinion. These arguments had more weight with philosophers than with the deputies, for it was already decided that they must make the Constitution. All the king offered, and a great deal more, they intended to take. Much that he insisted on preserving they were resolved to destroy. The offer, at its best, was vitiated by the alloy: for the most offensive privileges, immunities, and emoluments of rank were to be perpetuated, and it was against these that the fiercest force of the revolutionary movement was beating. In order that they might be abolished, the nation tendered its indefeasible support, its unconquerable power, to its representatives. If the Assembly, content with the advantage gained over the king, had surrendered unconditionally to the nobles, and assented, for a few political reforms, to the social degradation of the democracy, they would have betrayed their constituents. On that consideration they were compelled to act. They acted also on the principle, which was not new, which came down indeed from mediaeval divines, but which was newly invested with universal authority, that the law is not the will of the sovereign that commands, but of the nation that obeys. It was the very marrow of the doctrine that obstruction of liberty is crime, that absolute authority is not a thing to be consulted, but a thing to be removed, and that resistance to it is no affair of interest or convenience, but of sacred obligation. Every drop of blood shed in the American conflict was shed in a cause immeasurably inferior to theirs, against a system more legitimate by far than that of June 23. Unless Washington was an assassin, it was their duty to oppose, if it might be, by policy, if it must be, by force, the mongrel measure of concession and obstinacy which the Court had carried against the proposals of Necker. That victory was reversed, and the success of the Commons was complete. They had brought the three orders into one; they had compelled the king to retract his declaration and to restore his disgraced minister; they had exposed the weakness of their oppressors, and they had the nation at their back.