The law by which this royal family is specifically destined to the succession is the act of the 12th and 13th of King William. The terms of this act bind "us, and our _heirs_, and our _posterity_, to them, their _heirs_, and their _posterity_," being Protestants, to the end of time, in the same words as the Declaration of Right had bound us to the heirs of King William and Queen Mary. It therefore secures both an hereditary crown and an hereditary allegiance. On what ground, except the constitutional policy of forming an establishment to secure that kind of succession which is to preclude a choice of the people forever, could the legislature have fastidiously rejected the fair and abundant choice which our own country presented to them, and searched in strange lands for a foreign princess, from whose womb the line of our future rulers were to derive their title to govern millions of men through a series of ages? The Princess Sophia was named in the act of settlement of the 12th and 13th of King William, for a _stock_ and root of _inheritance_ to our kings, and not for her merits as a temporary administratrix of a power which she might not, and in fact did not, herself ever exercise. She was adopted for one reason, and for one only,--because, says the act, "the most excellent Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess Dowager of Hanover, is _daughter_ of the most excellent Princess Elizabeth, late Queen of Bohemia, _daughter_ of our late _sovereign lord_ King James the First, of happy memory, and is hereby declared to be the next in _succession_ in the Protestant line," &c., &c.; "and the crown shall continue to the _heirs_ of her body, being Protestants." This limitation was made by Parliament, that through the Princess Sophia an inheritable line not only was to be continued in future, but (what they thought very material) that through her it was to be connected with the old stock of inheritance in King James the First; in order that the monarchy might preserve an unbroken unity through all ages, and might be preserved (with safety to our religion) in the old approved mode by descent, in which, if our liberties had been once endangered, they had often, through all storms and struggles of prerogative and privilege, been preserved. They did well. No experience has taught us that in any other course or method than that of an _hereditary crown_ our liberties can be regularly perpetuated and preserved sacred as our _hereditary right_. An irregular, convulsive movement may be necessary to throw off an irregular, convulsive disease. But the course of succession is the healthy habit of the British Constitution. Was it that the legislature wanted, at the act for the limitation of the crown in the Hanoverian line, drawn through the female descendants of James the First, a due sense of the inconveniences of having two or three, or possibly more, foreigners in succession to the British throne? No!--they had a due