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Sec. 197. AS
conquest may be called a foreign
usurpation, so usurpation is a kind of domestic conquest, with this difference, that an
usurper can never have right on his side, it being no usurpation, but where one is got
into the possession of what another has right to. This, so far as it is usurpation, is a
change only of persons, but not of the forms and rules of the government: for if the
usurper extend his power beyond what of right belonged to the lawful princes, or governors
of the commonwealth, it is tyranny added to usurpation.
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Sec. 198. In all lawful governments, the designation of the
persons, who are to bear rule, is as natural and necessary a part as the form of the
government itself, and is that which had its establishment originally from the people; the
anarchy being much alike, to have no form of government at all, or to agree that it shall
be monarchical, but to appoint no way to design the person that shall have the power, and
be the monarch. Hence all commonwealths, with the form of government established, have
rules also of appointing those who are to have any share in the public authority, and
settled methods of conveying the right to them. Whoever gets into the exercise of any part
of the power, by other ways than what the laws of the community have prescribed, hath no
right to be obeyed, though the form of the commonwealth be still preserved; since he is
not the person the laws have appointed, and consequently not the person the people have
consented to. Nor can such an usurper, or any deriving from him, ever have a title, till
the people are both at liberty to consent, and have actually consented to allow, and
confirm in him the power he hath till then usurped.
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