The Sovereign owns very large properties; receives and
holds, in law, the entire revenue of the State; appoints and dismisses
Ministers; makes treaties; pardons crime, or abates its punishment;
wages war, or concludes peace; summons and dissolves the Parliament;
exercises these vast powers for the most part without any specified
restraint of law; and yet enjoys, in regard to these and every other
function, an absolute immunity from consequences. There is no provision
in the law of the United Empire, or in the machinery of the
Constitution, for calling the Sovereign to account; and only in one
solitary and improbable, but perfectly defined, case--that of his
submitting to the jurisdiction of the Pope--is he deprived by Statute of
the Throne. Setting aside that peculiar exception, the offspring of a
necessity still freshly felt when it was made, the Constitution might
seem to be founded on the belief of a real infallibility in its head.
Less, at any rate, cannot be said than this. Regal right has, since the
Revolution of 1688, been expressly founded upon contract; and the breach
of that contract destroys the title to the allegiance of the subject.
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