to act against such privileges
after he had allowed them. But to vest all the powers of government
inalienably in the King, so that whoever else may seem to partake in
them, shall partake only by royal sufferance, is tantamount to
declaring monarchy the sole valid and lawful polity. This declaration
the ministers, lay and clerical, of our Charleses and Jameses do not
seem to have made in express terms. It is, however, contained by
implication in their celebrated phrase of "the inalienable
prerogatives of the Crown," as interpreted by the stretches of
prerogative which they advised. They virtually asserted of one
particular polity, or distribution of civil power (c. viii., s. iii.,
n. 5, p. 312), that which is true only of civil power taken nakedly,
apart from the mode of its distribution--they said of _monarchy_ what
is true of _government_--that the sum of its power is a constant
quantity (c. viii., s. iv., n. 7, p. 322), and that it is of God
_antecedently_ to and irrespectively of any determination of popular
will. (c. viii., s. iv., n. 10, p. 325.)
3. Such a position is easily refuted, _negatively_, by its being
wholly unproven, unless the English Reformation, and the servile
spirit in Church and State that promoted and was promoted by the
Reformation, can pass for a proof; and again the position is
_positively_ refuted, when we come to consider how all that nature
requires and God commands, is government under some polity, not
government everywhere under monarchy; there being many workable
polities besides monarchy.
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