A second section of the Tory party held, on the other hand, that James having by his own act ceased to govern, had also ceased to reign. By deliberately laying aside the sceptre he had brought about a demise of the crown. It had simply devolved upon the person next in succession, and that person was, they declared, the Princess Mary. There was no need therefore for the creation of a Regent, and still less for the more extreme and wholly unprecedented step of appointing a new sovereign. All that was necessary was a mere formal recognition by the country of the bare legal facts of the case. According to this party the Princess Mary was in truth at that moment the lawful Queen of England, and nothing more was needed than a national acknowledgment of her title. To both of these doctrines the Whig party were equally opposed. They held in opposition to the former, that James had ceased to reign, and in opposition to the latter, that the crown had been not demised but simply forfeited. The King's destruction of his own right could not have, and had not had, the effect of transmitting them to any one else whomsoever. They resided at that moment, whatever constitutional fictions might aver to the contrary, in no one; and a special expression of the national will, a special exertion of the national power, would be required in favour of some designated successors to these rights before anybody could be regarded, whether in fact or law, as invested with them. Apart from all political prepossessions there can, I think, be no serious dispute as to which was the most logical and tenable contention of the three; and that this was distinctly that of the Whigs. The Tories who contended that James had lost his right to the personal exercise of the royal authority, while yet retaining so much of that authority that any one who exercised it in his stead must be supposed to do so as his deputy, were involved in a hopeless contradiction. In assuming to appoint such deputy to act for a person whom they still persisted in regarding as king _de jure_, they were themselves obviously usurping a portion of that very _jus_ which they professed to respect. True, they attempted to get over this objection by urging that James had placed himself under a disability to exercise his royal authority, but they could point to nothing in the facts of the case to support their contention. Disability to exercise royal authority could, in the view of the Constitution, arise from one cause alone, the same cause from which in the view of the common law arises the disability to exercise civil rights. The disabled King, like the disabled subject, must have become mentally incapacitated; and James's incapacitation for the work of government was purely moral. Setting aside the deposition and execution of his father, which even the Whigs did not endeavour to elevate into a regular precedent, there was no constitutional sanction for the