“For the sovereignty, or supreme authority,” said he, through failure of a legitimate prince, belongs to the people, and not to you, gentlemen, who are only servants, ministers, and deputies of the people.  You have your commissions or instructions surrounded by limitations—­which conditions are so widely different from the power of sovereignty, as the might of the subject is in regard to his prince, or of a servant in, respect to his master.  For sovereignty is not limited either as to power or as to time.  Still less do you represent the sovereignty; for the people, in giving the general and absolute government to the Earl of Leicester, have conferred upon him at once the exercise of justice, the administration of polity, of naval affairs, of war, and of all the other points of sovereignty.  Of these a governor-general is however only the depositary or guardian, until such time as it may please the prince or people to revoke the trust; there being no other in this state who can do this; seeing that it was the people, through the instrumentality of your offices—­through you as its servants—­conferred on his Excellency, this power, authority, and government.  According to the common rule law, therefore, ‘quo jure quid statuitur, eodem jure tolli debet.’  You having been fully empowered by the provinces and cities, or, to speak more correctly, by your masters and superiors, to confer the government on his Excellency, it follows that you require a like power in order to take it away either in whole or in part.  If then you had no commission to curtail his authority, or even that of the state-council, and thus to tread upon and usurp his power as governor general and absolute, there follows of two things one:  either you did not well understand what you were doing, nor duly consider how far that power reached, or—­much more probably—­you have fallen into the sin of disobedience, considering how solemnly you swore allegiance to him.

Thus subtly and ably did Wilkes defend the authority of the man who had deserted his post at a most critical moment, and had compelled the States, by his dereliction, to take the government into their own hands.

For, after all, the whole argument of the English counsellor rested upon a quibble.  The people were absolutely sovereign, he said, and had lent that sovereignty to Leicester.  How had they made that loan?  Through the machinery of the States-General.  So long then as the Earl retained the absolute sovereignty, the States were not even representatives of the sovereign people.  The sovereign people was merged into one English Earl.  The English Earl had retired—­indefinitely—­to England.  Was the sovereign people to wait for months, or years, before it regained its existence?  And if not, how was it to reassert its vitality?  How but through the agency of the States-General, who—­according to Wilkes himself—­had been fully empowered by the Provinces and Cities to confer the government on the Earl?  The people