side, there may be a risk of oversetting it on the other.  Every project of a material change in a government so complicated as ours, combined at the same time with external circumstances still more complicated, is a matter full of difficulties:  in which a considerate man will not be too ready to decide; a prudent man too ready to undertake; or an honest man too ready to promise.  They do not respect the public nor themselves, who engage for more than they are sure that they ought to attempt, or that they are able to perform.  These are my sentiments, weak perhaps, but honest and unbiassed; and submitted entirely to the opinion of grave men, well-affected to the constitution of their country, and of experience in what may best promote or hurt it.

Indeed, in the situation in which we stand, with an immense revenue, an enormous debt, mighty establishments, government itself a great banker and a great merchant, I see no other way for the preservation of a decent attention to public interest in the representatives, but the interposition of the body of the people itself, whenever it shall appear, by some flagrant and notorious act, by some capital innovation, that these representatives are going to overleap the fences of the law, and to introduce an arbitrary power.  This interposition is a most unpleasant remedy.  But, if it be a legal remedy, it is intended on some occasion to be used; to be used then only, when it is evident that nothing else can hold the constitution to its true principles.

The distempers of monarchy were the great subjects of apprehension and redress, in the last century; in this the distempers of Parliament.  It is not in Parliament alone that the remedy for Parliamentary disorders can be completed; hardly indeed can it begin there.  Until a confidence in government is re-established, the people ought to be excited to a more strict and detailed attention to the conduct of their representatives.  Standards for judging more systematically upon their conduct ought to be settled in the meetings of counties and corporations.  Frequent and correct lists of the voters in all important questions ought to be procured.

By such means something may be done.  By such means it may appear who those are, that, by an indiscriminate support of all administrations, have totally banished all integrity and confidence out of public proceedings; have confounded the best men with the worst; and weakened and dissolved, instead of strengthening and compacting, the general frame of government.  If any person is more concerned for government and order, than for the liberties of his country; even he is equally concerned to put an end to this course of indiscriminate support.  It is this blind and undistinguishing support, that feeds the spring of those very disorders, by which he is frightened into the arms of the faction which contains in itself the source of all disorders, by enfeebling all the visible and regular authority of the state.  The distemper is increased by his injudicious and preposterous endeavors, or pretences, for the cure of it.