had been governed by principles similar to those which he now reprobates?  The French system is in the mean time, by many active agents out of doors, rapturously praised; the British Constitution is coldly tolerated.  But these Constitutions are different both in the foundation and in the whole superstructure; and it is plain that you cannot build up the one but on the ruins of the other.  After all, if the French be a superior system of liberty, why should we not adopt it?  To what end are our praises?  Is excellence held out to us only that we should not copy after it?  And what is there in the manners of the people, or in the climate of France, which renders that species of republic fitted for them, and unsuitable to us?  A strong and marked difference between the two nations ought to be shown, before we can admit a constant, affected panegyric, a standing, annual commemoration, to be without any tendency to an example.

But the leaders of party will not go the length of the doctrines taught by the seditious clubs.  I am sure they do not mean to do so.  God forbid!  Perhaps even those who are directly carrying on the work of this pernicious foreign faction do not all of them intend to produce all the mischiefs which must inevitably follow from their having any success in their proceedings.  As to leaders in parties, nothing is more common than to see them blindly led.  The world is governed by go-betweens.  These go-betweens influence the persons with whom they carry on the intercourse, by stating their own sense to each of them as the sense of the other; and thus they reciprocally master both sides.  It is first buzzed about the ears of leaders, “that their friends without doors are very eager for some measure, or very warm about some opinion,—­that you must not be too rigid with them.  They are useful persons, and zealous in the cause.  They may be a little wrong, but the spirit of liberty must not be damped; and by the influence you obtain from some degree of concurrence with them at present, you may be enabled to set them right hereafter.”

Thus the leaders are at first drawn to a connivance with sentiments and proceedings often totally different from their serious and deliberate notions.  But their acquiescence answers every purpose.

With no better than such powers, the go-betweens assume a new representative character.  What at best was but an acquiescence is magnified into an authority, and thence into a desire on the part of the leaders; and it is carried down as such to the subordinate members of parties.  By this artifice they in their turn are led into measures which at first, perhaps, few of them wished at all, or at least did not desire vehemently or systematically.