The same case, we are told, namely, breach of the social compact and restoration of natural liberty, occurs when the members of the government usurp separately the power which they ought only to exercise in a body.[268] Now this description applies very fairly to the famous episode in our constitutional history, connected with George the Third’s first attack of madness in 1788.  Parliament cannot lawfully begin business without a declaration of the cause of summons from the crown.  On this occasion parliament both met and deliberated without communication from the crown.  What was still more important was a vote of the parliament itself, authorising the passing of letters patent under the great seal for opening parliament by commission, and for giving assent to a Regency Bill.  This was a distinct usurpation of regal authority.  Two members of the government (in Rousseau’s sense of the term), namely the houses of parliament, usurped the power which they ought only to have exercised along with the crown.[269] The Whigs denounced the proceeding as a fiction, a forgery, a phantom, but if they had been readers of the Social Contract, and if they had been bitten by its dogmatic temper, they would have declared the compact of union violated, and all British citizens free to resume their natural rights.  Not even the bitter virulence of faction at that time could tempt any politician to take up such a line, though within half a dozen years each of the democratic factions in France had worked at the overthrow of every other in turn, on the very principle which Rousseau had formulated and Robespierre had made familiar, that usurped authority is a valid reason for annihilating a government, no matter under what circumstances, nor how small the chance of replacing it by a better, nor how enormous the peril to the national well-being in the process.  The true opposite to so anarchic a doctrine is assuredly not that of passive obedience either to chamber or monarch, but the right and duty of throwing off any government which inflicts more disadvantages than it confers advantages.  Rousseau’s whole theory tends inevitably to substitute a long series of struggles after phrases and shadows in the new era, for the equally futile and equally bloody wars of dynastic succession which have been the great curse of the old.  Men die for a phrase as they used to die for a family.  The other theory, which all English politicians accept in their hearts, and so many commanding French politicians have seemed in their hearts to reject, was first expounded in direct view of Rousseau’s teaching by Paley.[270] Of course the greatest, widest, and loftiest exposition of the bearings of expediency on government and its conditions, is to be found in the magnificent and immortal pieces of Burke, some of them suggested by absolutist violations of the doctrine in our own affairs, and some of them by anarchic violation of it in the affairs of France, after the seed sown by Rousseau had brought forth fruit.