the government by supreme power, that makes them properly kings, and not the means of obtaining their crowns.” Which I think is a full answer to all his whole hypothesis and discourse about Adam’s royal authority, as the fountain from which all princes were to derive theirs: and he might have spared the trouble of speaking so much as he does, up and down, of heirs and inheritance, if to make anyone properly a king, needs no more but “governing by supreme power, and it matters not by what means he came by it.”
By this notable way our author may make Oliver as properly king, as anyone else he could think of: and had he had the happiness to live under Masaniello’s government, he could not by this his own rule have forborne to have done homage to him, with “O king, live forever,” since the manner of his government by supreme power made him properly king, who was but the day before properly a fisherman. And if Don Quixote had taught his squire to govern with supreme authority, our author, no doubt, could have made a most loyal subject in Sancho Pancha’s island: he must needs have deserved some preferment in such governments, since I think he is the first politician, who, pretending to settle government upon its true basis, and to establish the thrones of lawful princes, ever told the world, that he was “properly a king, whose manner of government was by supreme power, by what means soever he obtained it”; which, in plain English, is to say, that regal and supreme power is properly and truly his, who can by any means seize upon it: and if this be to be properly a king, I wonder how he came to think of, or where he will find, an usurper.
This is so strange a doctrine, that the surprise of it hath made me pass by, without their due reflection, the contradictions he runs into, by making sometimes inheritance alone, sometimes only grant or inheritance, sometimes only inheritance or usurpation, sometimes all these three, and at last election, or any other means, added to them, the ways whereby Adam’s royal authority, that is, his right to supreme rule, could be