at giving tranquillity to his Government. If those who advise him
may have an interest in disorder and confusion. If the opinion of
the people is against them, they will naturally wish that it should
have no prevalence. Here it is that the people must on their part
show themselves sensible of their own value. Their whole
importance, in the first instance, and afterwards their whole
freedom, is at stake. Their freedom cannot long survive their
importance. Here it is that the natural strength of the kingdom,
the great peers, the leading landed gentlemen, the opulent merchants
and manufacturers, the substantial yeomanry, must interpose, to
rescue their Prince, themselves, and their posterity.

We are at present at issue upon this point. We are in the great
crisis of this contention, and the part which men take, one way or
other, will serve to discriminate their characters and their
principles. Until the matter is decided, the country will remain in
its present confusion. For while a system of Administration is
attempted, entirely repugnant to the genius of the people, and not
conformable to the plan of their Government, everything must
necessarily be disordered for a time, until this system destroys the
constitution, or the constitution gets the better of this system.

There is, in my opinion, a peculiar venom and malignity in this
political distemper beyond any that I have heard or read of. In
former lines the projectors of arbitrary Government attacked only
the liberties of their country, a design surely mischievous enough
to have satisfied a mind of the most unruly ambition. But a system
unfavourable to freedom may be so formed as considerably to exalt
the grandeur of the State, and men may find in the pride and
splendour of that prosperity some sort of consolation for the loss