By what magic, what chicane of law, is it now annihilated, and rendered of no validity?
These questions were every where asked; and men, straitened by precedents and decisions of great authority, were reduced either to question the antiquity of this prerogative itself, or to assert, that even the practice of near five centuries could not bestow on it sufficient authority.[*] * Sir Robert Atkins, p.

21.
It was not considered, that the present difficulty or seeming absurdity had proceeded from late innovations introduced into the government.

Ever since the beginning of this century, the parliament had, with a laudable zeal, been acquiring powers and establishing principles favorable to law and liberty: the authority of the crown had been limited in many important particulars: and penal statutes were often calculated to secure the constitution against the attempts of ministers, as well as to preserve general peace, and repress crimes and immoralities.

A prerogative, however, derived from very ancient and almost uniform practice, the dispensing power, still remained, or was supposed to remain, with the crown; sufficient in an instant to overturn this whole fabric, and to throw down all fences of the constitution.

If this prerogative, which carries on the face of it such strong symptoms of an absolute authority in the prince, had yet, in ancient times, subsisted with some degree of liberty in the subject, this fact only proves that scarcely any human government, much less one erected in rude and barbarous times, is entirely consistent and uniform in all its parts.
But to expect that the dispensing power could, in any degree, be rendered compatible with those accurate and regular limitations which had of late been established, and which the people were determined to maintain, was a vain hope; and though men knew not upon what principles they could deny that prerogative, they saw that, if they would preserve their laws and constitution, there was an absolute necessity for denying, at least for abolishing it.