and this privilege has never been infringed by the king, or, that I have heard of, by any of his predecessors.  The Constitution of the Electoral dominions has, indeed, a double control, both from the laws of the Empire and from the privileges of the country.  Whatever rights the king enjoys as Elector have been always parentally exercised, and the calumnies of these scandalous societies have not been authorized by a single complaint of oppression.

“When Mr. Burke says that ’his Majesty’s heirs and successors, each in their time and order, will come to the crown with the same contempt of their choice with which his Majesty has succeeded to that he wears,’ it is saying too much even to the humblest individual in the country, part of whose daily labor goes towards making up the million sterling a year which the country gives the person it styles a king.  Government with insolence is despotism; but when contempt is added, it becomes worse; and to pay for contempt is the excess of slavery.  This species of government comes from Germany, and reminds me of what one of the Brunswick soldiers told me, who was taken prisoner by the Americans in the late war.  ‘Ah!’ said he, ’America is a fine free country:  it is worth the people’s fighting for.  I know the difference by knowing my own:  in my country, if the prince says, “Eat straw” we eat straw.’  God help that country, thought I, be it England, or elsewhere, whose liberties are to be protected by German principles of government and princes of Brunswick!”

“It is somewhat curious to observe, that, although the people of England have been in the habit of talking about kings, it is always a foreign house of kings,—­hating foreigners, yet governed by them.  It is now the House of Brunswick, one of the petty tribes of Germany.”

“If government be what Mr. Burke describes it, ’a contrivance of human wisdom,’ I might ask him if wisdom was at such a low ebb in England that it was become necessary to import it from Holland and from Hanover?  But I will do the country the justice to say, that was not the case; and even if it was, it mistook the cargo.  The wisdom of every country, when properly exerted, is sufficient for all its purposes; and there could exist no more real occasion in England to have sent for a Dutch Stadtholder or a German Elector than there was in America to have done a similar thing.  If a country does not understand its own affairs, how is a foreigner to understand them, who knows neither its laws, its manners, nor its language?  If there existed a man so transcendently wise above all others that his wisdom was necessary to instruct a nation, some reason might be offered for monarchy; but when we cast our eyes about a country, and observe how every part understands its own affairs, and when we look around the world, and see, that, of all men in it, the race of kings are the most insignificant in capacity, our reason cannot fail to ask us, What are those men kept for?"[20]