withdrawal of the reins of state from the hands of the monarch, on any ground save that of insanity. Once extend this, and admit that a king who is merely bad may be treated as though he were mad, and the Whig doctrine is thereby absolutely conceded. As to the practical inconveniences of a Regency exercised in the name of an actively hostile sovereign--a sovereign who would have been sometimes in arms against his own nominal authority, and always plotting its overthrow--they would of course have been both grave and numerous. But it is less surprising that the Regency party of that day should have ignored them than that they should have been so indifferent to the complete surrender of their political principles which was involved in the proposal to which they committed themselves. More logical in form, but equally untenable in fact, was the position assumed by the other section of the Tory party. There was perhaps nothing altogether irreconcilable with their principles in the theory that a voluntary abandonment of the throne might operate as a demise of the crown; but coolly to assert a right to pass over the infant Prince of Wales on the strength of the mere idle story that he was a supposititious child[6] was a pretension which, especially as put forward by men who were such sticklers for constitutional fictions as to insist that there must at any given moment be some one person or other entitled to wear the English crown, appears little short of preposterous. The Whig theory of the situation rejected the fictions of both branches of the Tory party with equal decision. There was no need, according to the Whigs, for the country to bewilder itself in efforts to distinguish between _de jure_ and _de facto_ sovereignty, still less to resort to the far-fetched expedient of assuming a demise of the crown in order to prevent the former kind of sovereignty from undergoing interruption. A king, they held, might lose his title to the crown by a voluntary abandonment of the throne; and he might lose that title without anybody succeeding to it. Indeed, since the English crown devolved according to the ordinary English laws of succession, it was impossible that anybody should succeed to it by mere _operation of law_ during its former wearer's life-time. If it was a principle of constitutional law that at any given moment there must be some lawful king or queen of England in existence, it was no less a principle of the common law that _nemo est hæres viventis_. James, therefore, had according to the Whig theory ceased to be sovereign, and no one else had become sovereign in his stead: the throne was vacant. Being vacant it was for the Convention to fill it, and the members of that body were both entitled and bound to select the fittest successor to it, unconstrained, though not necessarily uninfluenced, by the claims of successorship which would have vested in this, that, or the other person under an ordinary demise of the crown.