The disputes between privilege and prerogative may easily be composed by laws, and votes, and conferences, and concessions, where there is tolerable temper or prudence on both sides, or on either side. Among contending titles the question can only be determined by the sword, and by devastation, and by civil war. A prince who fills the throne with a disputed title dares not arm his subjects, the only method of securing a people fully, both against domestic oppression and foreign conquest. Notwithstanding all our riches and renown, what a critical escape did we lately make from dangers, which were owing, not so much to bad conduct and ill success in war, as to the pernicious practice of mortgaging our finances, and the still more pernicious maxim of never paying off our encumbrances? Such fatal measures could never have been embraced had it not been to secure a precarious establishment.​[111] But to convince us that an hereditary title is to be embraced rather than a parliamentary one, which is not supported by any other views or motives, a man needs only transport himself back to the era of the Restoration, and suppose that he had had a seat in that Parliament which recalled the royal family, and put a period to the greatest disorders that ever arose from the opposite pretensions of prince and people. What would have been thought of one that had proposed at that time to set aside Charles II. and settle the crown on the Duke of York or Gloucester, merely in order to exclude all high claims like those of their father and grandfather? Would not such a one have been regarded as a very extravagant projector, who loved dangerous remedies, and could tamper and play with a government and national constitution like a quack with a sickly patient? The advantages which result from a parliamentary title, preferably to an hereditary one, though they are great, are too refined ever to enter into the conception of the vulgar. The bulk of mankind would never allow them to be sufficient for committing what would be regarded as an injustice to the prince. They must be supported by some gross, popular, and familiar topics; and wise men, though convinced of their force, would reject them in compliance with the weakness and prejudices of the people. An encroaching tyrant or deluded bigot alone, by his misconduct, is able to enrage the nation and render practicable what was always perhaps desirable. In reality, the reason assigned by the nation for excluding the race of Stuart, and so many other branches of the royal family, is not on account of their hereditary title (which, however just in itself, would, to vulgar apprehensions, have appeared altogether absurd), but on account of their religion, which leads us to compare the disadvantages above mentioned of each establishment.