continually calling for reformation, and reformations more grievous than any evils.  Our boasted liberty sometimes trodden down, sometimes giddily set up, and ever precariously fluctuating and unsettled; it has only been kept alive by the blasts of continual feuds, wars, and conspiracies.  In no country in Europe has the scaffold so often blushed with the blood of its nobility.  Confiscations, banishments, attainders, executions, make a large part of the history of such of our families as are not utterly extinguished by them.  Formerly, indeed, things had a more ferocious appearance than they have at this day.  In these early and unrefined ages, the jarring part of a certain chaotic constitution supported their several pretensions by the sword.  Experience and policy have since taught other methods.

     At nunc res agitur tenui pulmone rubetae.

But how far corruption, venality, the contempt of honor, the oblivion of all duty to our country, and the most abandoned public prostitution, are preferable to the more glaring and violent effects of faction, I will not presume to determine.  Sure I am that they are very great evils.

I have done with the forms of government.  During the course of my inquiry you may have observed a very material difference between my manner of reasoning and that which is in use amongst the abettors of artificial society.  They form their plans upon what seems most eligible to their imaginations, for the ordering of mankind.  I discover the mistakes in those plans, from the real known consequences which have resulted from them.  They have enlisted reason to fight against itself, and employ its whole force to prove that it is an insufficient guide to them in the conduct of their lives.  But unhappily for us, in proportion as we have deviated from the plain rule of our nature, and turned our reason against itself, in that proportion have we increased the follies and miseries of mankind.  The more deeply we penetrate into the labyrinth of art, the further we find ourselves from those ends for which we entered it.  This has happened in almost every species of artificial society, and in all times.  We found, or we thought we found, an inconvenience in having every man the judge of his own cause.  Therefore judges were set up, at first, with discretionary powers.  But it was soon found a miserable slavery to have our lives and properties precarious, and hanging upon the arbitrary determination of any one man, or set of men.  We fled to laws as a remedy for this evil.  By these we persuaded ourselves we might know with some certainty upon what ground we stood.  But lo! differences arose upon the sense and interpretation of those laws.  Thus we were brought back to our old incertitude.  New laws were made to expound the old; and new difficulties arose upon the new laws; as words multiplied, opportunities of cavilling upon them multiplied also.  Then recourse was had to notes, comments, glosses, reports, responsa prudentum,