Page:Thoughts on civil liberty, on licentiousness and faction.djvu/126

 ; had threatened the Prince with a general Resignation; had thus intimidated him to their own Purposes; had by these Means usurped the legal Prerogatives of the Crown; and apply'd them rather to the Support of their own Influence, than to the public Welfare:—

If the legal Privileges of the People had fared no better in their Hands:—If These, too, had been swallowed up, in the great Gulph of aristocratic Power:—If the Members of the lower House, while they seemed to be the free Representatives of the People, had been in Truth, a great Part of them, no more than the commissioned Deputies of their respective Chiefs, whose Sentiments they declared, and whose Interests they pursued:—

If such a Set of Men, as soon as they had lost their Influence, should now rail at the Privileges of the Crown, as the Engines of Despotism, though they had been formerly allowed by the Wisdom of the State, as the occasional Securities of Freedom:—