It is not more the duty than it is the interest of a prince, to aim at giving tranquillity to his government.  But those who advise him may have an interest in disorder and confusion.  If the opinion of the people is against them, they will naturally wish that it should have no prevalence.  Here it is that the people must on their part show themselves sensible of their own value.  Their whole importance, in the first instance, and afterwards their whole freedom, is at stake.  Their freedom cannot long survive their importance.  Here it is that the natural strength of the kingdom, the great peers, the leading landed gentlemen, the opulent merchants and manufacturers, the substantial yeomanry, must interpose, to rescue their prince, themselves, and their posterity.

We are at present at issue upon this point.  We are in the great crisis of this contention; and the part which men take, one way or other, will serve to discriminate their characters and their principles.  Until the matter is decided, the country will remain in its present confusion.  For while a system of administration is attempted, entirely repugnant to the genius of the people, and not conformable to the plan of their government, everything must necessarily be disordered for a time, until this system destroys the constitution, or the constitution gets the better of this system.

There is, in my opinion, a peculiar venom and malignity in this political distemper beyond any that I have heard or read of.  In former times the projectors of arbitrary government attacked only the liberties of their country; a design surely mischievous enough to have satisfied a mind of the most unruly ambition.  But a system unfavorable to freedom may be so formed, as considerably to exalt the grandeur of the state; and men may find, in the pride and splendor of that prosperity, some sort of consolation for the loss of their solid privileges.  Indeed the increase of the power of the state has often been urged by artful men, as a pretext for some abridgment of the public liberty.  But the scheme of the junto under consideration, not only strikes a palsy into every nerve of our free constitution, but in the same degree benumbs and stupefies the whole executive power:  rendering government in all its grand operations languid, uncertain, ineffective; making ministers fearful of attempting, and incapable of executing any useful plan of domestic arrangement, or of foreign politics.  It tends to produce neither the security of a free government, nor the energy of a monarchy that is absolute.  Accordingly the crown has dwindled away, in proportion to the unnatural and turgid growth of this excrescence on the court.