[362]. Dr. Morse, the Geographer.
[363]. See his Life of George Washington.
[364]. See the Eulogium on Rittenhouse.
[365]. The names ordinarily used to distinguish things, do not always truly denote the nature of the things they are designed to signify: and it is very evident, that any misapplication of a name, to which a specific meaning has been appropriated, cannot alter or otherwise affect the essence or inherent quality of the thing itself to which it is wrongly applied.
A nation may be a republic, notwithstanding its chief executive magistrate be denominated a king. A kingly government may be essentially republican, provided the people be governed by known laws, and their king be limited in his prerogative, by the constitution of the state; not such a monarch as is vested with uncontrouled power. In this sense, the British government may, as some modern writers have shewn, be called a commonwealth, or republic: and under a similar impression, Sir Thomas Smith, even in the reign of so rigid a prince as Henry VIII. wrote his book De Republicâ Anglicanâ. The republic of Poland was long governed by elective kings; and Shakespeare, (nay, even the leveller Godwin,[[365a]]) appears to have considered Monarch, King and President, as synonymous terms.
[365a]. The Memorialist can truly say, with the author of the Pursuits of Literature:—“I have given some attention to Mr. Godwin’s work on Political Justice, as conceiving it to be the code of improved modern ethics, morality, and legislation. I confess I looked not for the Republic of Plato, or even for the Oceana of Harrington; but for something different from them all. I looked, indeed, for a superstructure raised on the revolutionary ground of Equality, watered with the Guillotine; and such I found it.” See Pursuits of Literature, Dial. the third, note p. of the seventh Lond. edit.
[366]. “It belongs to monarchies,” says Dr. Rush, “to limit the business of government to a privileged order of men.” See Eulog.
[367]. See Ritt. Orat. before the Am. Philos. Soc. in 1775.
[368]. See the ordaining clause of the Constitution of the United States.
[369]. Mr. Pope was not singular in the opinion here expressed: one of the most illustrious legislators and best practical statesmen the world has ever known, appears to have entertained the same sentiment, when he penned the following passages: they are extracted from the Frame of Government originally designed by William Penn, for Pennsylvania: published in the year 1682.