That no proud privilege from birth can spring, No right divine, nor compact form a king;

Book VII. Line 39.

The assumed right of kings, or that supreme authority which one man exercises over a nation, and for which he is not held accountable, has been contended for on various grounds. It has been sometimes called the right of conquest; in which is involved the absolute disposal of the lives and labors of the conquered nation, in favor of the victorious chief and his descendants to perpetuity. Sometimes it is called the divine right; in which case kings are considered as the vicegerents of God.

This notion is very ancient, and it is almost universal among modern nations. Homer is full of it; and from his unaffected recurrence to the same idea every where in his poems, it is evident that in his day it was not called in question. The manner in which the Jews were set at work to constitute their first king proves that they were convinced that, if they must have a king, he must be given them from God, and receive that solemn consecration which should establish his authority on the same divine right which was common to other nations, from whom they borrowed the principle.

There are some few instances in history wherein this divine right has been set aside; but it has generally been owing rather to the violence of circumstances, which sometimes drive men to act contrary to their prejudices, tho they still retain them, than to any effort of reasoning by which they convinced themselves that this was a prejudice, and that no divine right existed in reality. For it does not violate this supposed right, to change one king for another, or one race of kings for another, tho done in a manner the most unjust and inhuman. In this case the same divine right remains, and only changes, with the diadem, from one head to another. And tho this change should happen six times in one day (as in one instance it has done in Algiers by the murder of six successive kings) they would still say it was God who did it all; and the action would only tend to prove to the credulous people, that God was made after their own image, as changeable as themselves.

It is only in the case of Tarquin and a few others (whose overthrow has been followed by a more popular form of government) that it can be said that the principle of the divine right has been disregarded, laid aside and forgotten for any length of time.

The English are perhaps the first and only people that ever overturned this doctrine of the divinity of kings, without changing their form of government. This was brought on by circumstances, and took effect in the expulsion of James II. Books were then written to prove that the divine right of kings did not exist; at least, not in the sense in which it had been understood. And these writings completely silenced the old doctrine in England. This indeed was gaining an immense advantage in favor of liberty; tho the effort of reason, to arrive at it, seems to be so small.

But while the English were discarding the old principle they set up a new one; which indeed is not so pernicious because it cannot become so extensive, but which is scarcely more reasonable: it is the right of kings by compact; that is, a compact, whether written or understood, by which the representatives of a nation are supposed to bind their constituents and their descendants to be the subjects of a certain prince and of his descendants to perpetuity. This singular doctrine is developed with perspicuity, but ill supported by argument, in Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution.

The principle of the American government denies the right of any representatives to make such a compact, and the right of any prince to carry it into execution if it were made. Whatever varieties or mixtures there may be in the forms of government, there are but two distinct principles on which government is founded. One supposes the source of power to be out of the people, and that the governor is not accountable to them for the manner of using it; the other supposes the source of power to be in the people, and that the governor is accountable to them for the manner of using it. The latter is our principle. In this sense no right divine nor compact can form a king; that is, a person, exercising underived and unreverting power.