The constituent parts of a
state are obliged to hold their public faith with each other, and with
all those who derive any serious interest under their engagements, as
much as the whole state is bound to keep its faith with separate
communities: otherwise, competence and power would soon be confounded,
and no law be left but the will of a prevailing force. On this
principle, the succession of the crown has always been what it now is,
an hereditary succession by law: in the old line it was a succession by
the Common Law; in the new by the statute law, operating on the
principles of the Common Law, not changing the substance, but regulating
the mode and describing the persons. Both these descriptions of law are
of the same force, and are derived from an equal authority, emanating
from the common agreement and original compact of the state, _communi
sponsione reipublicae_, and as such are equally binding on king, and
people too, as long as the terms are observed, and they continue the
same body politic.
It is far from impossible to reconcile, if we do not suffer ourselves to
be entangled in the mazes of metaphysic sophistry, the use both of a
fixed rule and an occasional deviation,--the sacredness of an hereditary
principle of succession in our government with a power of change in its
application in cases of extreme emergency. Even in that extremity, (if
we take the measure of our rights by our exercise of them at the
Revolution,) the change is to be confined to the peccant part only,--to
the part which produced the necessary deviation; and even then it is to
be effected without a decomposition of the whole civil and political
mass, for the purpose of originating a new civil order out of the first
elements of society.
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