to have been wary, and timorous where they might well have been
secure. They were not shocked by hearing the same man maintain,
in the same breath, that, if twenty thousand professional
soldiers were kept up, the liberty and property of millions of
Englishmen would be at the mercy of the Crown, and yet that those
millions of Englishmen, fighting for liberty and property, would
speedily annihilate an invading army composed of fifty or sixty
thousand of the conquerors of Steinkirk and Landen. Whoever
denied the former proposition was called a tool of the Court.
Whoever denied the latter was accused of insulting and slandering
the nation.

Somers was too wise to oppose himself directly to the strong
current of popular feeling. With rare dexterity he took the tone,
not of an advocate, but of a judge. The danger which seemed so
terrible to many honest friends of liberty he did not venture to
pronounce altogether visionary. But he reminded his countrymen
that a choice between dangers was sometimes all that was left to
the wisest of mankind. No lawgiver had ever been able to devise a
perfect and immortal form of government. Perils lay thick on the
right and on the left; and to keep far from one evil was to draw
near to another. That which, considered merely with reference to
the internal polity of England, might be, to a certain extent,
objectionable, might be absolutely essential to her rank among
European Powers, and even to her independence. All that a
statesman could do in such a case was to weigh inconveniences
against each other, and carefully to observe which way the scale
leaned. The evil of having regular soldiers, and the evil of not
having them, Somers set forth and compared in a little treatise,
which was once widely renowned as the Balancing Letter, and which