from feeling; none when they are under the influence of imagination.  Remove a grievance, and, when men act from feeling, you go a great way towards quieting a commotion.  But the good or bad conduct of a government, the protection men have enjoyed or the oppression they have suffered under it, are of no sort of moment, when a faction, proceeding upon speculative grounds, is thoroughly heated against its form.  When a man is from system furious against monarchy or episcopacy, the good conduct of the monarch or the bishop has no other effect than further to irritate the adversary.  He is provoked at it as furnishing a plea for preserving the thing which he wishes to destroy.  His mind will be heated as much by the sight of a sceptre, a mace, or a verge, as if he had been daily bruised and wounded by these symbols of authority.  Mere spectacles, mere names, will become sufficient causes to stimulate the people to war and tumult.

Some gentlemen are not terrified by the facility with which government has been overturned in France.  “The people of France,” they say, “had nothing to lose in the destruction of a bad Constitution; but, though not the best possible, we have still a good stake in ours, which will hinder us from desperate risks.”  Is this any security at all against those who seem to persuade themselves, and who labor to persuade others, that our Constitution is an usurpation in its origin, unwise in its contrivance, mischievous in its effects, contrary to the rights of man, and in all its parts a perfect nuisance?  What motive has any rational man, who thinks in that manner, to spill his blood, or even to risk a shilling of his fortune, or to waste a moment of his leisure, to preserve it?  If he has any duty relative to it, his duty is to destroy it.  A Constitution on sufferance is a Constitution condemned.  Sentence is already passed upon it.  The execution is only delayed.  On the principles of these gentlemen, it neither has nor ought to have any security.  So far as regards them, it is left naked, without friends, partisans, assertors, or protectors.

Let us examine into the value of this security upon the principles of those who are more sober,—­of those who think, indeed, the French Constitution better, or at least as good as the British, without going to all the lengths of the warmer politicians in reprobating their own.  Their security amounts in reality to nothing more than this,—­that the difference between their republican system and the British limited monarchy is not worth a civil war.  This opinion, I admit, will prevent people not very enterprising in their nature from an active undertaking against the British Constitution.  But it is the poorest defensive principle that ever was infused into the mind of man against the attempts of those who will enterprise.  It will tend totally to remove from their minds that very terror of a civil war which is held out as our sole security.  They who think so well of the French Constitution certainly will