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Untitled Article
lordship talks of upholding ' the just prerogatives of the monarch . ' The thorough indistinctness of the expression makes it a good specimen of this middle-muddling . Your lordship does not mean a monarch ; you mean a king . In the powers of a monarch , or sole ruler , all prerogative is absorbed . He needs it not , nor has it ( under that form or denomination ) , because he has so much
more . Prerogative is that fragment of irresponsible authority which remains to him who was a monarch , after he is cut down to a king . When the king becomes merely the executive of the national will , the responsible chief magistrate of the community , he ceases to have any prerogative . The measure of his power is its tendency to the public good . The hereditary right of the monarch being his tenure , prerogative is a superfluity ; the
common good being the rule , prerogative is an injustice . The king must hold on the one ground or the other ; either of the people , or independently of the people ; either for them , or for himself . Out of the confusion of the two principles springs this anomaly of ' just prerogative . ' How much of it is ' just ? ' And
why ? One portion of it consists in authority , at any time , to dissolve Parliament . Suppose that experience shows this power to be detrimental to the people ' s well-being : on your theory of 'just prerogative' may the king be deprived of it , or may he not ? If he may , you sanction injustice ; if he may not , known public mischief is perpetuated . Your lordship ' s political creed is full of these perplexities and puerilities ; this patch-work of phrases as substitutes for principles . You are also pledged to uphold the ' necessary connexion' of Church and State . The connexion which is necessary needs no champion ; and such a connexion is rather oddly predicated of associations which not only exist , or
have existed , independently of each other , but which in that independence have most flourished . If a Church , i . e . public machinery for religious and moral instruction , be essential to the well-being of a nation , it is then a portion , an integral portion , of every wellordered state , and not an external something with which that state is in * connexion / whether necessary or unnecessary . Your lordship takes a middle course between the theories of eeeleHiustieul dependence and independence ; and so you entangle yourself in an inconsistency , which you may find as perplexing in practice as untenable in theorv .
The nature of the change which the diffusion of intelligence produces upon government * han now become pretty evident . They originated in force , to end in freedom . All we destined to tne transition from d « wpotiHin to republicnniHiii . Not less clour is it that originall y the strongest or the mittiest became the monarch , than it ih that eventually enlightened comnmnitUM * will be Helf-governed . How far regality ih consistent , with Unit . self-government , will bo a problem for j ) osW » iit y to nolve , in a period , the remoteneaa of which may greatly vury in different
Untitled Article
488 A Letter to Lord Stanley
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 1, 1835, page 438, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2647/page/2/
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