It is true, that every wise statesman keeps sound and general political principles in his eye, as the pilot looks upon his compass to discover his true course.  But this true course cannot always be followed out straight and diametrically; it must be altered from time to time, nay sometimes apparently abandoned, on account of shoals, breakers, and headlands, not to mention contrary winds.  The same obstacles occur to the course of the statesman.  The point at which he aims may be important, the principle on which he steers may be just; yet the obstacles arising from rooted prejudices, from intemperate passions, from ancient practices, from a different character of people, from varieties in climate and soil, may cause a direct movement upon his ultimate object to be attended with distress to individuals, and loss to the community, which no good man would wish to occasion, and with dangers which no wise man would voluntarily choose to encounter.

Although I think the Chancellor of the Exchequer has been rather precipitate in the decided opinion which he is represented to have expressed on this occasion, I am far from entertaining the slightest disrespect for the right honourable gentleman.  ’I hear as good exclamation upon him as on any man in Messina, and though I am but a poor man, I am glad to hear it.’  But a decided attachment to abstract principle, and to a spirit of generalising, is—­like a rash rider on a headstrong horse—­very apt to run foul of local obstacles, which might have been avoided by a more deliberate career, where the nature of the ground had been previously considered.

I make allowance for the temptation natural to an ingenious and active mind.  There is a natural pride in following out an universal and levelling principle.  It seems to augur genius, force of conception, and steadiness of purpose; qualities which every legislator is desirous of being thought to possess.  On the other hand, the study of local advantages and impediments demands labour and inquiry, and is rewarded after all only with the cold and parsimonious praise due to humble industry.  It is no less true, however, that measures which go straight and direct to a great general object, without noticing intervening impediments, must often resemble the fierce progress of the thunderbolt or the cannon-ball, those dreadful agents, which, in rushing right to their point, care not what ruin they make by the way.  The sounder and more moderate policy, accommodating its measures to exterior circumstances, rather resembles the judicious course of a well-conducted highway, which, turning aside frequently from its direct course,

    ‘Winds round the corn-field and the hill of vines,’

and becomes devious, that it may respect property and avoid obstacles; thus escaping even temporary evils, and serving the public no less in its more circuitous, than it would have done in its direct course.

Can you tell me, sir, if this uniformity of civil institutions, which calls for such sacrifices, be at all descended from, or related to, a doctrine nearly of the same nature, called Conformity in religious doctrine, very fashionable about one hundred and fifty years since, which undertook to unite the jarring creeds of the United Kingdom to one common standard, and excited a universal strife by the vain attempt, and a thousand fierce disputes, in which she