rely different; to a considerable and
rapidly-increasing population; where there was a numerous peasantry,
a trading middle class struggling into existence; the system of Dutch
finance, pursued more or less for nearly a century and a half, has ended
in the degradation of a fettered and burthened multitude. Nor have the
demoralizing consequences of the funding system on the more favoured
classes been less decided. It has made debt a national habit; it has
made credit the ruling power, not the exceptional auxiliary, of all
transactions; it has introduced a loose, inexact, haphazard, and
dishonest spirit in the conduct of both public and private life; a
spirit dazzling and yet dastardly: reckless of consequences and yet
shrinking from responsibility. And in the end, it has so overstimulated
the energies of the population to maintain the material engagements
of the state, and of society at large, that the moral condition of the
people has been entirely lost sight of.

A mortgaged aristocracy, a gambling foreign commerce, a home trade
founded on a morbid competition, and a degraded people; these are great
evils, but ought perhaps cheerfully to be encountered for the greater
blessings of civil and religious liberty. Yet the first would seem in
some degree to depend upon our Saxon mode of trial by our peers, upon
the stipulations of the great Norman charters, upon the practice and
the statute of Habeas Corpus,--a principle native to our common law,
but established by the Stuarts; nor in a careful perusal of the Bill
of Rights, or in an impartial scrutiny of the subsequent legislation of
those times, though some diminution of our political franchises must be
confessed, is it easy to discover any increase of our civil privileges.
To those indeed who believe that the English nation,--at all times
a religious and Catholic people, but who even in the days of the
Plantagenets were anti-papal,--were in any danger of again falling under
the yoke of the Pope of Rome in the reign of James the Second, religious
liberty was perhaps acceptable, though it took the shape of a discipline
which at once anathematized a great portion of the nation, and virtually
establishing Puritanism in Ireland, laid the foundation of those
mischiefs which are now endangering the empire.

That the last of the Stuarts had any other object in his impolitic
manoeuvres, than an impracticable scheme to blend the two churches,
there is now authority to disbelieve.