vice and immorality, that which, without any constitution, keeps rulers in awe, force, and the spirit to use it.  Parliaments, it is true, were rarely held, and were not very respectfully treated.  The great charter was often violated.  But the people had a security against gross and systematic misgovernment, far stronger than all the parchment that was ever marked with the sign-manual, and than all the wax that was ever pressed by the great seal.

It is a common error in politics to confound means with ends.  Constitutions, charters, petitions of right, declarations of right, representative assemblies, electoral colleges, are not good government; nor do they, even when most elaborately constructed, necessarily produce good government.  Laws exist in vain for those who have not the courage and the means to defend them.  Electors meet in vain where want makes them the slaves of the landlord, or where superstition makes them the slaves of the priest.  Representative assemblies sit in vain unless they have at their command, in the last resort the physical power which is necessary to make their deliberations free, and their votes effectual.

The Irish are better represented in parliament than the Scotch, who indeed are not represented at all.  But are the Irish better governed than the Scotch?  Surely not.  This circumstance has of late been used as an argument against reform.  It proves nothing against reform.  It proves only this, that laws have no magical, no supernatural, virtue; that laws do not act like Aladdin’s lamp or Prince Ahmed’s apple; that priestcraft, that ignorance, that the rage of contending factions, may make good institutions useless; that intelligence, sobriety, industry, moral freedom, firm union, may supply in a great measure the defects of the worst representative system.  A people whose education and habits are such that, in every quarter of the world they rise above the mass of those with whom they mix, as surely as oil rises to the top of water, a people of such temper and self-government that the wildest popular excesses recorded in their history partake of the gravity of judicial proceedings, and of the solemnity of religious rites, a people whose national pride and mutual attachment have passed into a proverb, a people whose high and fierce spirit, so forcibly described in the haughty motto which encircles their thistle, preserved their independence, during a struggle of centuries, from the encroachments of wealthier and more powerful neighbours, such a people cannot be long oppressed.  Any government, however constituted, must respect their wishes and tremble at their discontents.  It is indeed most desirable that such a people should exercise a direct influence on the conduct of affairs, and should make their wishes known through constitutional organs.  But some influence, direct or indirect, they will assuredly possess.  Some organ, constitutional or unconstitutional, they will assuredly find.  They will be better