A Treatise on Government; Shewing, that the Right of the Kings of Scotland to the Crown was Not Strictly and Absolutely Hereditary. Against the Earl of Cromarty, Sir George Mackenzie the King's Advocate, Mr. John Sage Stiled the Cyprianick Doctor, and the Learned Antiquarian Mr. Thomas Ruddiman
By George Logan
Edinburgh: Printed and sold by the booksellers here and at Glasgow, 1746. First Edition. 8vo, half-leather binding, xxxii, 182, [4]pp.
ABOUT THIS BOOK This is an interesting piece of Scottish political history challenging the idea that the Scottish Crown was always inherited by an absolute hereditary right, and belongs to a particularly contentious period in Scottish history, immediately following the Jacobite rising of 1745–46.
Logan's central proposition was that the Scottish monarchy was not governed by an unalterable principle of hereditary succession. In other words, the Scottish people and their political institutions had historically exercised some choice over who should occupy the throne. This was an important constitutional argument because the Jacobites maintained that the Stuart dynasty possessed a legitimate hereditary claim to the British throne.
Logan's position challenged that claim by appealing to Scottish history rather than simply to contemporary political loyalties. The work is therefore relevant to three overlapping areas of collecting: Scottish constitutional history, the Jacobite controversy, and eighteenth-century political pamphleteering.
CONDITION A good copy. The leather binding is good with some rubbing and signs of age. Bookplate to inside front board (Baillie of Culter Allers). There is also a cancelled Edinburgh University Library stamp to the front inside board. Title page has several brown spots obscuring some of the text. Text clean throughout with the exception of some light spotting and light water-stains between pages 131 and 142 (see images). Page 89 has a small piece torn from the bottom margin just clipping one of the words to the footnote. Overall a good complete copy. Scarce.