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Peter Plymley's Letters, and selected essays by Sydney Smith
page 94 of 166 (56%)
its fatal influence are men disgusted by religious intolerance. Our
establishments are so enormous, and so utterly disproportioned to
our population, that every second or third man you meet in society
gains something from the public; my brother the commissioner,--my
nephew the police justice,--purveyor of small beer to the army in
Ireland,--clerk of the mouth,--yeoman to the left hand,--these are
the obstacles which common sense and justice have now to overcome.
Add to this that the King, old and infirm, excites a principle of
very amiable generosity in his favour; that he has led a good,
moral, and religious life, equally removed from profligacy and
methodistical hypocrisy; that he has been a good husband, a good
father, and a good master; that he dresses plain, loves hunting and
farming, fates the French, and is in all his opinions and habits,
quite English: --these feelings are heightened by the present
situation of the world, and the yet unexploded clamour of
Jacobinism. In short, from the various sources of interest,
personal regard, and national taste, such a tempest of loyalty has
set in upon the people that the 47th proposition in Euclid might now
be voted down with as much ease as any proposition in politics; and
therefore if Lord Hawkesbury hates the abstract truths of science as
much as he hates concrete truth in human affairs, now is his time
for getting rid of the multiplication table, and passing a vote of
censure upon the pretensions of the hypotenuse. Such is the history
of English parties at this moment: you cannot seriously suppose
that the people care for such men as Lord Hawkesbury, Mr. Canning,
and Mr. Perceval on their own account; you cannot really believe
them to be so degraded as to look to their safety from a man who
proposes to subdue Europe by keeping it without Jesuit's Bark. The
people at present have one passion, and but one -

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