Property and prerogatives.
Hereditary succession an absolute right.
But why, might the lawyer reply, should rights founded on hereditary succession yield any more readily in the case of government than in the case of property? The distribution of property influences the general welfare quite as much as the management of power. Suppose it were proved that the general welfare of your parish would be promoted by the division of your land among the destitute there. You have nothing to oppose to such a proposition but your hereditary right. And the king has that to oppose to any plan of a division of his prerogatives and powers among the people who would like to share them.
Whatever may be thought of this reasoning on this side of the Atlantic, and at the present day, it was considered very satisfactory in England two or three centuries ago. The true and proper jurisdiction of an English monarch, as it had existed from ancient times, was considered as an absolute right, vesting in each successive inheritor of the crown, and which the community could not justly interfere with or disturb for any reasons less imperious than such as would authorize an interference with the right of succession to private property. Indeed, it is probable that, with most men at that time, an inherited right to govern was regarded as the most sacred of the two.
Three things hereditary in England.
The fact seems to be, that the right of a son to come into the place of his father, whether in respect to property, power, or social rank, is not a natural, inherent, and indefeasible right, but a privilege which society accords, as a matter of convenience and expediency. In England, expediency is, on the whole, considered to require that all three of these things, viz., property, rank, and power, in certain cases, should descend from father to son. In this country, on the other hand, we confine the hereditament to property, abrogating it in the case of rank and power. In neither case is there probably any absolute natural right, but a conventional right is allowed to take its place in one, or another, or all of these particulars, according to the opinion of the community in respect to what its true interests and the general welfare, on the whole, require.
The Stuarts.
The kings themselves of this Stuart race—which race includes Mary Queen of Scots, the mother of the line, and James I., Charles I., Charles II., and James II.—entertained very high ideas of these hereditary rights of theirs to govern the realm of England. They felt a determination to maintain these rights and powers at all hazards. Charles ascended the throne with these feelings, and the chief point of interest in the history of his reign is the contest in which he engaged with the English people in his attempts to maintain them.
Parliament.
The Legislature in the United States.