care for: he that has a great deal to lose, will think twice,
where he that has nothing to lose, will not think at all: and the
government of this vast and powerful empire, we imagine, with great
deference, must require a good deal of thinking. In a free press, we
have a never-dying exponent of public opinion, a perpetual advocate of
rational liberty, and a powerful engine for the exposure, which is
ultimately the redress, of wrong: and although this influential member
of our government receives no public money, nor is called right
honourable, nor speaks in the House, yet in fact and in truth it has a
seat in the Cabinet, and, upon momentous occasions, a voice of thunder.

That the aristocracy of power should be in advance of public opinion, is
not in the nature of things, and should no more be imputed as a crime to
them, than to us not to run when we are not in a hurry: they cannot, as
a body, move upwards, because they stand so near the top, that dangerous
ambition is extinguished; and it is hardly to be expected that, as a
body, they should move downwards, unless they find themselves supported
in their position upon the right of others, in which case we have always
seen that, although they descend gradually, they descend at last.

This immobility of our aristocracy is the origin of the fixity of our
political institutions, which has been, is, and will continue to be, the
great element of our pre-eminence as a nation: it possesses a force
corrective and directive, and at once restrains the excess, while it
affords a point of resistance, to the current of the popular will. And
this immobility, it should never be forgotten, is owing to that very
elevation so hated and so envied: wanting which the aristocracy would be
subject to the vulgar ambitions, vulgar passions, and sordid desires of
meaner aspirants after personal advantage and distinction. It is a
providential blessing, we firmly believe, to a great nation to possess a
class, by fortune and station, placed above the unseemly contentions of
adventurers in public life: looked up to as men responsible without hire
for the public weal, and, without sordid ambitions of their own,
solicitous to preserve it: looked up to, moreover, as examples of that
refinement of feeling, jealous sense of honour, and manly independence,
serving as detersives of the grosser humours of commercial life, and
which, filtering through the successive _strata_ of society, clarify and
purify i