The purpose for which the abuses of government are brought into view forms a very material consideration in the mode of treating them.  The complaints of a friend are things very different from the invectives of an enemy.  The charge of abuses on the late monarchy of France was not intended to lead to its reformation, but to justify its destruction.  They who have raked into all history for the faults of kings, and who have aggravated every fault they have found, have acted consistently, because they acted as enemies.  No man can be a friend to a tempered monarchy who bears a decided hatred to monarchy itself.  He, who, at the present time, is favorable or even fair to that system, must act towards it as towards a friend with frailties who is under the prosecution of implacable foes.  I think it a duty, in that case, not to inflame the public mind against the obnoxious person by any exaggeration of his faults.  It is our duty rather to palliate his errors and defects, or to cast them into the shade, and industriously to bring forward any good qualities that he may happen to possess.  But when the man is to be amended, and by amendment to be preserved, then the line of duty takes another direction.  When his safety is effectually provided for, it then becomes the office of a friend to urge his faults and vices with all the energy of enlightened affection, to paint them in their most vivid colors, and to bring the moral patient to a better habit.  Thus I think with regard to individuals; thus I think with regard to ancient and respected governments and orders of men.  A spirit of reformation is never more consistent with itself than when it refuses to be rendered the means of destruction.

I suppose that enough is said upon these heads of accusation.  One more I had nearly forgotten, but I shall soon dispatch it.  The author of the Reflections, in the opening of the last Parliament, entered on the journals of the House of Commons a motion for a remonstrance to the crown, which is substantially a defence of the preceding Parliament, that had been dissolved under displeasure.  It is a defence of Mr. Fox.  It is a defence of the Whigs.  By what connection of argument, by what association of ideas, this apology for Mr. Fox and his party is by him and them brought to criminate his and their apologist, I cannot easily divine.  It is true that Mr. Burke received no previous encouragement from Mr. Fox, nor any the least countenance or support, at the time when the motion was made, from him or from any gentleman of the party,—­one only excepted, from whose friendship, on that and on other occasions, he derives an honor to which he must be dull indeed to be insensible.[11] If that remonstrance, therefore, was a false or feeble defence of the measures of the party, they were in no wise affected by it.  It stands on the journals.  This secures to it a permanence which the author cannot expect to any other work of his.  Let it speak for itself to the present age and to all posterity.  The party had no concern in it; and it can never be quoted against them.  But in the late debate it was produced, not to clear the party from an improper defence in which they had no share, but for the kind purpose of insinuating an inconsistency between the principles of Mr. Burke’s defence of the dissolved Parliament and those on which he proceeded in his late Reflections on France.