his true home: that their cause is habitually just and
habitually the weaker, although now bewildered and led astray
by an unwonted gleam of success. He protests so strongly
against their evil that he chooses to die by their hands rather
than in their company; but die he must, for there is no place
left on earth where his sympathies can breathe freely; he is
obliged to leave the country of his affections, and life
elsewhere is intolerable. This man is no renegade, no apostate,
but the purest of martyrs: for what testimony to truth can be
so pure as that which is given uncheered by any sympathy; given
not against friends, amidst unpitying or half-rejoicing
enemies. And such a martyr was Falkland!

"Others who fall off from a popular party in its triumph, are
of a different character; ambitious men, who think that they
become necessary to their opponents and who crave the glory of
being able to undo their own work as easily as they had done
it: passionate men, who, quarrelling with their old associates
on some personal question, join the adversary in search of
revenge; vain men, who think their place unequal to their
merits, and hope to gain a higher on the opposite side: timid
men, who are frightened as it were at the noise of their own
guns, and the stir of actual battle--who had liked to dally
with popular principles in the parade service of debating or
writing in quiet times, but who shrink alarmed when both sides
are become thoroughly in earnest: and again, quiet and honest
men, who never having fully comprehended the general principles
at issue, and judging only by what they see before them, are
shocked at the violence of their party, and think that the
opposite party is now become innocent and just, because it is
now suffering wrong rather than doing it. Lastly, men who
rightly understand that good government is the result of
popular and anti-popular principles blended together, rather
than of the mere ascendancy of either; whose aim, therefore, is
to prevent either from going too far, and to throw their weight
into the lighter scale: wise men and most useful, up to the
moment when the two parties are engaged in actual civil war,
and the question is--which shall conquer? For no man can
pretend to limit the success of a party, wh