Chapter XVII
                            Of Usurpation

  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.
  198. In all lawful governments the designation of the persons who
are to bear rule being as natural and necessary a part as the form
of the government itself, and 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,
yet appoint no way to design the person that shall have the power
and be the monarch- all commonwealths, therefore, with the form of
government established, have rules also of appointing and conveying
the right to those who are to have any share in the public
authority; and 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.