degree of inconsistency.  He is persuaded that they are totally indifferent at which end they begin the demolition of the Constitution.  Some are for commencing their operations with the destruction of the civil powers, in order the better to pull down the ecclesiastical,—­some wish to begin with the ecclesiastical, in order to facilitate the ruin of the civil; some would destroy the House of Commons through the crown, some the crown through the House of Commons, and some would overturn both the one and the other through what they call the people.  But I believe that this injured writer will think it not at all inconsistent with his present duty or with his former life strenuously to oppose all the various partisans of destruction, let them begin where or when or how they will.  No man would set his face more determinedly against those who should attempt to deprive them, or any description of men, of the rights they possess.  No man would be more steady in preventing them from abusing those rights to the destruction of that happy order under which they enjoy them.  As to their title to anything further, it ought to be grounded on the proof they give of the safety with which power may be trusted in their hands.  When they attempt without disguise, not to win it from our affections, but to force it from our fears, they show, in the character of their means of obtaining it, the use they would make of their dominion.  That writer is too well read in men not to know how often the desire and design of a tyrannic domination lurks in the claim of an extravagant liberty.  Perhaps in the beginning it always displays itself in that manner.  No man has ever affected power which he did not hope from the favor of the existing government in any other mode.

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The attacks on the author’s consistency relative to France are (however grievous they may be to his feelings) in a great degree external to him and to us, and comparatively of little moment to the people of England.  The substantial charge upon him is concerning his doctrines relative to the Revolution of 1688.  Here it is that they who speak in the name of the party have thought proper to censure him the most loudly and with the greatest asperity.  Here they fasten, and, if they are right in their fact, with sufficient judgment in their selection.  If he be guilty in this point, he is equally blamable, whether he is consistent or not.  If he endeavors to delude his countrymen by a false representation of the spirit of that leading event, and of the true nature and tenure of the government formed in consequence of it, he is deeply responsible, he is an enemy to the free Constitution of the kingdom.  But he is not guilty in any sense.  I maintain that in his Reflections he has stated the Revolution and the Settlement upon their true principles of legal reason and constitutional policy.