In order to be entitled to offer such resistance, a public law would
be required to permit it. But the supreme legislation would by such
a law cease to be supreme, and the people as subjects would be made
sovereign over that to which they are subject; which is a
contradiction. And the contradiction becomes more apparent when the
question is put: "Who is to be the judge in a controversy between
the people and the sovereign?" For the people and the sovereign are to
be constitutionally or juridically regarded as two different moral
persons; but the question shows that the people would then have to
be the judge in their own cause.
The dethronement of a monarch may be also conceived as a voluntary
abdication of the crown, and a resignation of his power into the hands
of the people; or it might be a deliberate surrender of these
without any assault on the royal person, in order that the monarch may
be relegated into private life. But, however it happen, forcible
compulsion of it, on the part of the people, cannot be justified under
the pretext of a right of necessity (casus necessitatis); and least of
all can the slightest right be shown for punishing the sovereign on
the ground of previous maladministration. For all that has been
already done in the quality of a sovereign must be regarded as done
outwardly by right; and, considered as the source of the laws, the
sovereign himself can do no wrong.
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