national prosperity. My inaugural lecture has told you how deeply I
sympathize with his view--taking my stand, as Mr. Carlyle does, on
the Hebrew prophets.

There is, nevertheless, a side of truth in the constitutionalist
view, which Mr. Carlyle, I think, overlooks. A bad political
constitution does produce poverty and weakness: but only in as far
as it tends to produce moral evil; to make men bad. That it can help
to do. It can put a premium on vice, on falsehood, on peculation, on
laziness, on ignorance; and thus tempt the mass to moral degradation,
from the premier to the slave. Russia has been, for two centuries
now but too patent a proof of the truth of this assertion. But even
in this case, the moral element is the most important, and just the
one which is overlooked. To have good laws, M. Guizot is apt to
forget, you must first have good men to make them; and second, you
must have good men to carry them out, after they are made. Bad men
can abuse the best of laws, the best of constitutions. Look at the
working of our parliaments during the reigns of William III and Anne,
and see how powerless good constitutions are, when the men who work
them are false and venal. Look, on the other hand, at the Roman
Empire from the time of Vespasian to that of the Antonines, and see
how well even a bad constitution will succeed, when good men are
working it.

Bad laws, I say, will work tolerably under good men, if fitted to the
existing circumstances by men of the world, as all Roman laws were.
If they had not been such, how was the Roman Empire, at least in its
first years, a blessing to the safety, prosperity, and wealth of
every country it enslaved? But when defective Roman laws began to be
worked by bad men, and that for 200 years, then indeed came times of