n their course, leaving the very dregs the cleaner for their
passage.

A body thus by habit and constitution opposed to innovation, and
determined against the recklessness of inconsiderate reforms, has
furnished a stock argument to those who delight in "going a-head" faster
than their feet, which are the grounds of their arguments, can carry
them. We hear the aristocracy called stumbling-blocks in the way of
legislative improvements, and, with greater propriety of metaphor,
likened to drags upon the wheel of progressive reform; and so on,
through all the regions of illustration, until we are in at the death of
the metaphor. How happens to be overlooked the advantage of this
anti-progressive barrier, to the concentration and deepening of the
flood of opinion on any given subject? how is it that men are apt
altogether to forget that this very barrier it is which prevents the too
eager crowd from trampling one another to death in their haste? which
gives time for the ebullitions of unreasoning zeal, and reckless
enthusiasm, and the dregs of agitation, quietly to subside; and, for all
that, bears the impress of reason and sound sense to circulate with
accumulated pressure through the public mind? Were it not for the
barrier which the aristocracy of power thus interposes for a time, only
to withdraw when the time for interposition is past, we should live in a
vortex of revolution and counter-revolution. Our whole time, and our
undivided energies, would be employed in acting hastily, and repenting
at leisure; in repining either because our biennial revolutions went too
far, or did not go far enough; in expending our national strength in the
unprofitable struggles of faction with faction, adventurer with
adventurer: with every change we should become more changeful, and with
every settlement more unsettled: one by one our distant colonies would
follow the bright example of our people at home, and our commerce and
trade would fall with our colonial empire. In fine, we should become in
the eyes of the world what France now is--a people ready to sacrifice
every solid advantage, every gradual, and therefore permanent,
improvement, every ripening fruit that time and care, and the sunshine
of peace only can mature, to a genius for revolution.

This turbulent torrent of headlong reform, to-day flooding its banks,
to-morrow dribbling in a half-dry channel, the aristocracy of power
collects, concentrates, and converts into a power, ev