cases everybody would find out the sophistry, and presently answer, that although common men are not exactly skilled in the composition or application of medicines, or in prescribing the limits of duty; yet the difference between poisons and remedies is easily known by their effects, and common reason soon distinguishes between virtue and vice: And it must be necessary to forbid both these the further practice of their professions, because their crimes are not purely personal to the physician or the divine, but destructive to the public. All which is infinitely stronger in respect to a prince, with whose good or ill conduct the happiness or misery of a whole nation is included; whereas it is of small consequence to the public, farther than examples, how any private person manages his property. But granting that the right of a lineal successor to a crown were upon the same foot with the property of a subject, still It may at any time be transferred by the legislative power, as other properties frequently are. The supreme power in a state can do no wrong, because whatever that doth, is the action of all; and when the lawyers apply this maxim to the king, they must understand it only in that sense as he is administrator of the supreme power, otherwise it is not universally true, but may be controlled in several instances easy to produce. And these are the topics we must proceed upon to justify our exclusion of the young Pretender in France; that of his suspected birth being merely popular, and therefore not made use of as I remember, since the Revolution in any speech, vote, or proclamation where there was occasion to mention him. As to the abdication of King James, which the advocates on that side look upon to have been forcible and unjust, and consequently void in itself, I think a man may observe every article of the English Church, without being in much pain about it. 'Tis not unlikely that all doors were laid open for his departure, and perhaps not without the privity of the Prince of Orange, as reasonably concluding that the kingdom might be settled in his absence: But to affirm he had any cause to apprehend the same treatment with his father, is an improbable scandal flung upon the nation by a few bigotted French scribblers, or the invidious assertion of a ruined party at home, in the bitterness of their souls: Not one material circumstance agreeing with those in 1648; and the greatest part of the nation having preserved the utmost horror for that ignominious murder: But whether his removal were caused by his own fears or other men's artifices, 'tis manifest to me, that supposing the throne to be vacant, which was the foot they went upon, the body of the people were thereupon left at liberty, to choose what form of government they pleased, by themselves or their representatives.