Although I think the Chancellor of the Exchequer has been rather
precipitate in the decided opinion which he is represented to have
expressed on this occasion, I am far from entertaining the slightest
disrespect for the right honourable gentleman. 'I hear as good
exclamation upon him as on any man in Messina, and though I am but a
poor man, I am glad to hear it.' But a decided attachment to abstract
principle, and to a spirit of generalising, is--like a rash rider on a
headstrong horse--very apt to run foul of local obstacles, which might
have been avoided by a more deliberate career, where the nature of the
ground had been previously considered.

I make allowance for the temptation natural to an ingenious and active
mind. There is a natural pride in following out an universal and
levelling principle. It seems to augur genius, force of conception,
and steadiness of purpose; qualities which every legislator is
desirous of being thought to possess. On the other hand, the study of
local advantages and impediments demands labour and inquiry, and is
rewarded after all only with the cold and parsimonious praise due to
humble industry. It is no less true, however, that measures which go
straight and direct to a great general object, without noticing
intervening impediments, must often resemble the fierce progress of
the thunderbolt or the cannon-ball, those dreadful agents, which, in
rushing right to their point, care not what ruin they make by the way.
The sounder and more moderate policy, accommodating its measures to
exterior circumstances, rather resembles the judicious course of a
well-conducted highway, which, turning aside frequently from its
direct course,

'Winds round the corn-field and the hill of vines,'

and becomes devious, that it may respect property and avoid obstacles;
thus escaping even temporary evils, and serving the public no less in
its more circuitous, than it would have done in its direct course.

Can you tell me, sir, if this _uniformity_ of civil institutions,
which calls for such sacrifices, be at all descended from, or related
to, a doctrine nearly of the same nature, called Conformity in
religious doctrine, very fashionable about one hundred and fifty years
since, which undertook to unite the jarring creeds of the United
Kingdom to one common standard, and excited a universal strife by the
vain attempt, and a thousand fierce disputes, in which she

'----umpire sate,
And b