“But to revert to the law of responsibility.  This ought not to be in effect a safeguard for law itself.  As such, it is superfluous in this country, where law reigns, and where it would never occur to any one that this could be otherwise.  But upon the Continent it is of the highest importance; as, where the government is an outgrowth of a relation of supremacy and subordination between sovereign and subject, and the servant, trained in ideas natural to this relation, does not know which to obey, the law of the sovereign, the existence of such a law would deprive him of the excuse which, should he offend the law, and so be guilty of a crime, is ready to his hand in the phrase, ’The sovereign ordered it so, I have merely obeyed,’ while it would be a protection to the sovereign that his servants, if guilty of a crime, should not be able to saddle him with the blame of it.”—­Life of the Prince Consort, v., 262.]

[Footnote 7:  “Lives of the Lord Chancellors,” c. cxliii.]

[Footnote 8:  Indeed, the opinion which Lord Campbell thus expresses is manifestly at variance with that which he had previously pronounced in his life of Lord Northington, where he praised the House of Lords for “very properly rejecting the bill passed by the Commons declaring general warrants to be illegal, leaving this question to be decided (as it was, satisfactorily) by the Courts of Common Law.”]

[Footnote 9:  From a speech of Mr. Grenville delivered at a later period (February 3, 1769, “Parliamentary History,” xvi., 548), it appears that the Secretaries of State who signed this general warrant did so against their own judgment.  “They repeatedly proposed to have Wilkes’s name inserted in the warrant of apprehension, but were overruled by the lawyers and clerks of the office, who insisted that they could not depart from the long-established precedents and course of proceeding.”  And in one of these debates, Mr. Pitt, while denouncing with great severity Grenville’s conduct in procuring the issue of this particular warrant, was driven to a strange confession of his own inconsistency, since he was forced to admit that, while Secretary of State, he had issued more than one general warrant in exactly similar form.]

[Footnote 10:  Strange to say, it does not seem absolutely certain that Wilkes was the author of the “Essay on Woman.”  Horace Walpole eventually learned, or believed that he had learned, that the author was a Mr. Thomas Potter. (See Walpole’s “George III.,” i., 310; and Cunningham’s “Note on his Correspondence,” iv., 126.)]

[Footnote 11:  These are the words of the resolution.—­Parliamentary History, xvi., 537.  But it does not appear what the three libels were.  The “Essay on Woman” was one, the paraphrase of “Veni Creator” was a second; no third of that character is mentioned.]