It would be a serious imputation upon the prudence of my friend, to have made even such trivial sacrifices as it was in his power to make for principles which he did not truly embrace or did not perfectly understand.  In either case the folly would have been great.  The question now is, whether, when he first practically professed Whig principles, he understood what principles he professed, and whether in his book he has faithfully expressed them.

When he entered into the Whig party, he did not conceive that they pretended to any discoveries.  They did not affect to be better Whigs than those were who lived in the days in which principle was put to the test.  Some of the Whigs of those days were then living.  They were what the Whigs had been at the Revolution,—­what they had been during the reign of Queen Anne,—­what they had been at the accession of the present royal family.

What they were at those periods is to be seen.  It rarely happens to a party to have the opportunity of a clear, authentic, recorded declaration of their political tenets upon the subject of a great constitutional event like that of the Revolution.  The Whigs had that opportunity,—­or to speak more properly, they made it.  The impeachment of Dr. Sacheverell was undertaken by a Whig ministry and a Whig House of Commons, and carried on before a prevalent and steady majority of Whig peers.  It was carried on for the express purpose of stating the true grounds and principles of the Revolution,—­what the Commons emphatically called their foundation.  It was carried on for the purpose of condemning the principles on which the Revolution was first opposed and afterwards calumniated, in order, by a juridical sentence of the highest authority, to confirm and fix Whig principles, as they had operated both in the resistance to King James and in the subsequent settlement, and to fix them in the extent and with the limitations with which it was meant they should be understood by posterity.  The ministers and managers for the Commons were persons who had, many of them, an active share in the Revolution.  Most of them had seen it at an age capable of reflection.  The grand event, and all the discussions which led to it and followed it, were then alive in the memory and conversation of all men.  The managers for the Commons must be supposed to have spoken on that subject the prevalent ideas of the leading party in the Commons, and of the Whig ministry.  Undoubtedly they spoke also their own private opinions; and the private opinions of such men are not without weight.  They were not umbratiles doctores, men who had studied a free Constitution only in its anatomy and upon dead systems.  They knew it alive and in action.