I am much indebted for your kind letter of February the 29th, and for your valuable volume on the English constitution.  I have, read this with pleasure and much approbation, and think it has deduced the constitution of the English nation from its rightful root, the Anglo-Saxon, it is really wonderful, that so many able and learned men should have failed in their attempts to define it with correctness.  No wonder then, that Paine, who thought more than he read, should have credited the great authorities who have declared, that the will of Parliament is the constitution of England.  So Marbois, before the French revolution, observed to me, that the Almanac Royal was the constitution of France.  Your derivation of it from the Anglo-Saxons, seems to be made on legitimate principles.  Having driven out the former inhabitants of that part of the island called England, they became aborigines as to you, and your lineal ancestors.  They doubtless had a constitution; and although they have not left it in a written formula, to the precise text of which you may always appeal, yet they have left fragments of their history and laws, from which it may be inferred with considerable certainty.  Whatever their history and laws show to have been practised with approbation, we may presume was permitted by their constitution; whatever was not so practised, was not permitted.  And although this constitution was violated and set at nought by Norman force, yet force cannot change right.  A perpetual claim was kept up by the nation, by their perpetual demand of a restoration of their Saxon laws; which shows they were never relinquished by the will of the nation.  In the pullings and haulings for these ancient rights, between the nation, and its kings of the races of Plantagenets, Tudors, and Stuarts, there was sometimes gain, and sometimes loss, until the final re-conquest of their rights from the Stuarts.  The destitution and expulsion of this race broke the thread of pretended inheritance extinguished all regal usurpations, and the nation reentered into all its rights; and although in their bill of rights they specifically reclaimed some only, yet the omission of the others was no renunciation of the right to assume their exercise also, whenever occasion should occur.  The new King received no rights or powers, but those expressly granted to him.  It has ever appeared to me, that the difference between the whig and the tory of England is, that the whig deduces his rights from the Anglo-Saxon source, and the tory from the Norman.  And Hume, the great apostle of toryism, says in so many words, (note AA to chapter 42,) that, in the reign of the Stuarts, ’it was the people who encroached upon the sovereign, not the sovereign who attempted, as is pretended, to usurp upon the people.’  This supposes the Norman usurpations to be rights in his successors.  And again, (C. 159,) ’the Commons established a principle, which is noble in itself, and seems specious, but is belied by all history and experience, that the people are the origin of all just power.’  And where else will this degenerate son of science, this traitor to his fellow-men, find the origin of just powers, if not in the majority of the society?  Will it be in the minority?  Or in an individual of that minority?