Their principles always go to the extreme.  They who go with the principles of the ancient Whigs, which are those contained in Mr. Burke’s book, never can go too far.  They may, indeed, stop short of some hazardous and ambiguous excellence, which they will be taught to postpone to any reasonable degree of good they may actually possess.  The opinions maintained in that book never can lead to an extreme, because their foundation is laid in an opposition to extremes.  The foundation of government is there laid, not in imaginary rights of men, (which at best is a confusion of judicial with civil principles,) but in political convenience, and in human nature,—­either as that nature is universal, or as it is modified by local habits and social aptitudes.  The foundation of government (those who have read that book will recollect) is laid in a provision for our wants and in a conformity to our duties:  it is to purvey for the one, it is to enforce the other.  These doctrines do of themselves gravitate to a middle point, or to some point near a middle.  They suppose, indeed, a certain portion of liberty to be essential to all good government; but they infer that this liberty is to be blended into the government, to harmonize with its forms and its rules, and to be made subordinate to its end.  Those who are not with that book are with its opposite; for there is no medium besides the medium itself.  That medium is not such because it is found there, but it is found there because it is conformable to truth and Nature.  In this we do not follow the author, but we and the author travel together upon the same safe and middle path.

The theory contained in his book is not to furnish principles for making a new Constitution, but for illustrating the principles of a Constitution already made.  It is a theory drawn from the fact of our government.  They who oppose it are bound to show that his theory militates with that fact; otherwise, their quarrel is not with his book, but with the Constitution of their country.  The whole scheme of our mixed Constitution is to prevent any one of its principles from being carried as far as, taken by itself, and theoretically, it would go.  Allow that to be the true policy of the British system, then most of the faults with which that system stands charged will appear to be, not imperfections into which it has inadvertently fallen, but excellencies which it has studiously sought.  To avoid the perfections of extreme, all its several parts are so constituted as not alone to answer their own several ends, but also each to limit and control the others; insomuch that, take which of the principles you please, you will find its operation checked and stopped at a certain point.  The whole movement stands still rather than that any part should proceed beyond its boundary.  From thence it results that in the British Constitution there is a perpetual treaty and compromise going on, sometimes openly, sometimes with less observation.  To him who contemplates the British Constitution, as to him who contemplates the subordinate material world, it will always be a matter of his most curious investigation to discover the secret of this mutual limitation.