If we search still further back into antiquity, we shall find that all the great nations which have at various times preponderated over their neighbours, attained their utmost force and vigour, during the period of their greatest freedom and virtue; and that their decadence and ultimate annihilation were the work of a succession of vicious and tyrannical rulers.  The empires of Persia and of Greece, were successively established by the superior freedom and virtue of their citizens; and it was only when the institutions, which were the source of this freedom and virtue, were no longer reverenced and enforced, that each in its turn became the prey of a freer and more virtuous people.

The experience of modern times is still more conclusive on this subject; because no part of the chain of events which have contributed to the aggrandisement or impair of existing nations, lies hid in the mist of ages.  If we regard the unprecedented wealth and power of our own country, we shall be convinced that her present pre-eminent position is not so much the effect of her soil and climate, since in these respects she is confessedly behind many of the nations of Europe, as of the superior freedom of her laws, which have engendered her a freer, more virtuous, and more warlike race of people.  It is to her superior polity alone that she is indebted for a dominion, unparalleled in the history of the world; and it is to its rigid maintenance and enforcement that she must look for its durability.

While England has been thus assiduously attentive to her own immediate internal prosperity, she has not in general been neglectful of those external possessions, which she has gradually acquired by colonization, by conquest, or by cession.  On the most distant branches of her empire, she has engrafted, as far as circumstances would in general admit, those institutions which have been the main cause of her own internal happiness and prosperity.  In the West Indies, in Canada, and lately in the Ionian Islands, she has introduced the elective franchise, and established that mixed counterpoising form of government, whose three component parts, though essentially different in their natures, so admirably coalesce and form one combined harmonious whole.  It has, in fact, been one of the leading maxims of her political conduct, and undoubtedly one of the chief causes of her present greatness, to attach the people who have been embodied into her empire, or who have emigrated from her shores only to colonise new countries, and thus to extend her limits and increase her resources, by an equality of rights and privileges with her subjects at home.  The navigation act, indeed, militates in some degree, against the liberal view here taken of her colonial policy; but the existence of this single act, which, however its wisdom may be at present canvassed, there can be no doubt has proved the basis of her commercial and maritime ascendancy, will not invalidate the claim