Those knots or cabals of men who have got together, avowedly without any public principle, in order to sell their conjunct iniquity at the higher rate, and are therefore universally odious, ought never to be suffered to domineer in the state; because they have no connection with the sentiments and opinions of the people.

These are considerations which in my opinion enforce the necessity of having some better reason, in a free country, and a free Parliament, for supporting the ministers of the crown, than that short one, That the king has thought proper to appoint them.  There is something very courtly in this.  But it is a principle pregnant with all sorts of mischief, in a constitution like ours, to turn the views of active men from the country to the court.  Whatever be the road to power, that is the road which will be trod.  If the opinion of the country be of no use as a means of power or consideration, the qualities which usually procure that opinion will be no longer cultivated.  And whether it will be right, in a state so popular in its constitution as ours, to leave ambition without popular motives, and to trust all to the operation of pure virtue in the minds of kings, and ministers, and public men, must be submitted to the judgment and good sense of the people of England.

Cunning men are here apt to break in, and, without directly controverting the principle, to raise objections from the difficulty under which the sovereign labors, to distinguish the genuine voice and sentiments of his people, from the clamor of a faction, by which it is so easily counterfeited.  The nation, they say, is generally divided into parties, with views and passions utterly irreconcilable.  If the king should put his affairs into the hands of any one of them, he is sure to disgust the rest; if he select particular men from among them all, it is a hazard that he disgusts them all.  Those who are left out, however divided before, will soon run into a body of opposition; which, being a collection of many discontents into one focus, will without doubt be hot and violent enough.  Faction will make its cries resound through the nation, as if the whole were in an uproar, when by far the majority, and much the better part, will seem for a while as it were annihilated by the quiet in which their virtue and moderation incline them to enjoy the blessings of government.  Besides that the opinion of the mere vulgar is a miserable rule even with regard to themselves, on account of their violence and instability.  So that if you were to gratify them in their humor to-day, that very gratification would be a ground of their dissatisfaction on the next.  Now as all these rules of public opinion are to be collected with great difficulty, and to be applied with equal uncertainty as to the effect, what better can a king of England do, than to employ such men as he finds to have views and inclinations most conformable to his own; who are least infected