* * * * *
The second claim of the Revolution Society is "a right of cashiering
their governors for _misconduct_." Perhaps the apprehensions our
ancestors entertained of forming such a precedent as that "of cashiering
for misconduct" was the cause that the declaration of the act which
implied the abdication of King James was, if it had any fault, rather
too guarded and too circumstantial.[82] But all this guard, and all this
accumulation of circumstances, serves to show the spirit of caution
which predominated in the national councils, in a situation in which men
irritated by oppression, and elevated by a triumph over it, are apt to
abandon themselves to violent and extreme courses; it shows the anxiety
of the great men who influenced the conduct of affairs at that great
event to make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery
of future revolutions.
No government could stand a moment, if it could be blown down with
anything so loose and indefinite as an opinion of "_misconduct_." They
who led at the Revolution grounded their virtual abdication of King
James upon no such light and uncertain principle. They charged him with
nothing less than a design, confirmed by a multitude of illegal overt
acts, to _subvert the Protestant Church and State_, and their
_fundamental_, unquestionable laws and liberties: they charged him with
having broken the _original contrast_ between king and people.
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