Note 365 — THE CONCLUSION: COMPREHENDING A RETROSPECT OF THE LIFE OF DAVID RITTENHOUSE,
Reading edition
The names ordinarily used to distinguish things, do not always truly denote the nature of the things they are designed to signify: and it is very evident, that any misapplication of a name, to which a specific meaning has been appropriated, cannot alter or otherwise affect the essence or inherent quality of the thing itself to which it is wrongly applied.
A nation may be a republic, notwithstanding its chief executive magistrate be denominated a king. A kingly government may be essentially republican, provided the people be governed by known laws, and their king be limited in his prerogative, by the constitution of the state; not such a monarch as is vested with uncontrouled power. In this sense, the British government may, as some modern writers have shewn, be called a commonwealth, or republic: and under a similar impression, Sir Thomas Smith, even in the reign of so rigid a prince as Henry VIII. wrote his book De Republicâ Anglicanâ. The republic of Poland was long governed by elective kings; and Shakespeare, (nay, even the leveller Godwin,[365a]) appears to have considered Monarch, King and President, as synonymous terms.