or even in the fictions of poetic imagination, could possibly match it,—­if it should be a judgment which, with cold, unfeeling cruelty, after long deliberations, should condemn millions of innocent people to extortion, to rapine, and to blood, and should devote some of the finest countries upon earth to ravage and desolation,—­does any one think that any servile apologies of mine, or any strutting and bullying insolence of their own, can save them from the ruin that must fell on all institutions of dignity or of authority that are perverted from their purport to the oppression of human nature in others and to its disgrace in themselves?  As the wisdom of men mates such institutions, the folly of men destroys them.  Whatever we may pretend, there is always more in the soundness of the materials than in the fashion of the work.  The order of a good building is something.  But if it be wholly declined from its perpendicular, if the cement is loose and incoherent, if the stones are scaling with every change of the weather, and the whole toppling on our heads, what matter is it whether we are crushed by a Corinthian or a Doric ruin?  The fine form of a vessel is a matter of use and of delight.  It is pleasant to see her decorated with cost and art.  But what signifies even the mathematical truth of her form,—­what signify all the art and cost with which she can be carved, and painted, and gilded, and covered with decorations from stem to stern,—­what signify all her rigging and sails, her flags, her pendants, and her streamers,—­what signify even her cannon, her stores, and her provisions, if all her planks and timbers be unsound and rotten?

    Quamvis Pontica pinus,
    Silvae filia nobilis,
    Jactes et genus et nomen inutile.

I have been stimulated, I know not how, to give you this trouble by what very few except myself would think worth any trouble at all.  In a speech in the House of Lords, I have been attacked for the defence of a scheme of government in which that body inheres, and in which alone it can exist.  Peers of Great Britain may become as penitent as the sovereign of Prussia.  They may repent of what they have done in assertion of the honor of their king, and in favor of their own safety.  But never the gloom that lowers over the fortune of the cause, nor anything which the great may do towards hastening their own fall, can make me repent of what I have done by pen or voice (the only arms I possess) in favor of the order of things into which I was born and in which I fondly hoped to die.

In the long series of ages which have furnished the matter of history, never was so beautiful and so august a spectacle presented to the moral eye as Europe afforded the day before the Revolution in France.  I knew, indeed, that this prosperity contained in itself the seeds of its own danger.  In one part of the society it caused laxity and debility; in the other it produced bold spirits and dark designs.  A false philosophy