uncertain, and which, when power is suffered in bad hands, may chance to
fall rather on the injured than the criminal.


CONFIDENCE IN THE PEOPLE.

They may be assured, that however they amuse themselves with a variety
of projects for substituting something else in the place of that great
and only foundation of government, the confidence of the people, every
attempt will but make their condition worse. When men imagine that their
food is only a cover for poison, and when they neither love nor trust
the hand that serves it, it is not the name of the roast beef of Old
England, that will persuade them to sit down to the table that is spread
for them. When the people conceive that laws, and tribunals, and even
popular assemblies, are perverted from the ends of their institution,
they find in those names of degenerated establishments only new motives
to discontent. Those bodies which, when full of life and beauty, lay in
their arms, and were their joy and comfort, when dead and putrid, become
but the more loathsome from remembrance of former endearments. A sullen
gloom and furious disorder prevail by fits: the nation loses its relish
for peace and prosperity; as it did in that season of fulness which
opened our troubles in the time of Charles the First. A species of men
to whom a state of order would become a sentence of obscurity, are
nourished into a dangerous magnitude by the heat of intestine
disturbances; and it is no wonder that, by a sort of sinister piety,
they cherish, in their turn, the disorders which are the parents of all
their consequence.


FALSE MAXIMS ASSUMED AS FIRST PRINCIPLES.