After all, if the king were to bring himself to echo
this new kind of address, to adopt it in terms, and even to take the
appellation of Servant of the People as his royal style, how either he
or we should be much mended by it I cannot imagine. I have seen very
assuming letters, signed "Your most obedient, humble servant". The
proudest denomination that ever was endured on earth took a title of
still greater humility than that which is now proposed for
sovereigns by the Apostle of Liberty. Kings and nations were
trampled upon by the foot of one calling himself "the Servant of
Servants"; and mandates for deposing sovereigns were sealed with the
signet of "the Fisherman".
* Pp. 22-24.
I should have considered all this as no more than a sort of
flippant, vain discourse, in which, as in an unsavory fume, several
persons suffer the spirit of liberty to evaporate, if it were not
plainly in support of the idea and a part of the scheme of "cashiering
kings for misconduct". In that light it is worth some observation.
Kings, in one sense, are undoubtedly the servants of the people
because their power has no other rational end than that of the general
advantage; but it is not true that they are, in the ordinary sense (by
our constitution, at least), anything like servants; the essence of
whose situation is to obey the commands of some other and to be
removable at pleasure.
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