In this state things will be suffered to proceed, lest measures of vigor should precipitate a crisis.  The timid will act thus from character, the wise from necessity.  Our laws had done all that the old condition of things dictated to render our judges erect and independent; but they will naturally fail on the side upon which they had taken no precautions.  The judicial magistrates will find themselves safe as against the crown, whose will is not their tenure; the power of executing their office will be held at the pleasure of those who deal out fame or abuse as they think fit.  They will begin rather to consult their own repose and their own popularity than the critical and perilous trust that is in their hands.  They will speculate on consequences, when they see at court an ambassador whose robes are lined with a scarlet dyed in the blood of judges.  It is no wonder, nor are they to blame, when they are to consider how they shall answer for their conduct to the criminal of to-day turned into the magistrate of to-morrow.

The press------

The army------

When thus the helm of justice is abandoned, an universal abandonment of all other posts will succeed.  Government will be for a while the sport of contending factions, who, whilst they fight with one another, will all strike at her.  She will be buffeted and beat forward and backward by the conflict of those billows, until at length, tumbling from the Gallic coast, the victorious tenth wave shall ride, like the bore, over all the rest, and poop the shattered, weather-beaten, leaky, water-logged vessel, and sink her to the bottom of the abyss.

Among other miserable remedies that have been found in the materia medica, of the old college, a change of ministry will be proposed, and probably will take place.  They who go out can never long with zeal and good-will support government in the hands of those they hate.  In a situation of fatal dependence on popularity, and without one aid from the little remaining power of the crown, it is not to be expected that they will take on them that odium which more or less attaches upon every exertion of strong power.  The ministers of popularity will lose all their credit at a stroke, if they pursue any of those means necessary to give life, vigor, and consistence to government.  They will be considered as venal wretches, apostates, recreant to all their own principles, acts, and declarations.  They cannot preserve their credit, but by betraying that authority of which they are the guardians.

To be sure, no prognosticating symptoms of these things have as yet appeared,—­nothing even resembling their beginnings.  May they never appear!  May these prognostications of the author be justly laughed at and speedily forgotten!  If nothing as yet to cause them has discovered itself, let us consider, in the author’s excuse, that we have not yet seen a Jacobin legation in England.  The natural, declared, sworn ally of sedition has not yet fixed its head-quarters in London.