er informed than in any other part of Europe, the rights of the
many have generally been asserted against themselves by the patriotism
of the few. Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government
can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular. It may
be well doubted, whether a liberal policy with regard to our commercial
relations would find any support from a parliament elected by universal
suffrage. The republicans on the other side of the Atlantic have
recently adopted regulations of which the consequences will, before
long, show us,

"How nations sink, by darling schemes oppressed,
When vengeance listens to the fool's request."

The people are to be governed for their own good; and, that they may
be governed for their own good, they must not be governed by their
own ignorance. There are countries in which it would be as absurd to
establish popular government as to abolish all the restraints in a
school, or to untie all the strait-waistcoats in a madhouse.

Hence it may be concluded that the happiest state of society is that in
which supreme power resides in the whole body of a well-informed people.
This is an imaginary, perhaps an unattainable, state of things. Yet, in
some measure, we may approximate to it; and he alone deserves the name
of a great statesman, whose principle it is to extend the power of the
people in proportion to the extent of their knowledge, and to give them
every facility for obtaining such a degree of knowledge as may render
it safe to trust them with absolute power. In the mean time, it is
dangerous to praise or condemn constitutions in the abstract; since,
from the despotism of St Petersburg to the democracy of Washington,
there is scarcely a form of government which might not, at least in some
hypothetical case, be the best possible.

If, however, there be any form of government which in all ages and all
nations has always been, and must always be, pernicious, it is certainly
that which Mr Mitford, on his usual principle of being wiser than all
the rest of the world, has taken under his especial patronage--pure
oligarchy. This is closely, and indeed inseparably, connected with
another of his eccentric tastes, a marked partiality for Lacedaemon, and
a dislike of Athens. Mr Mitford's book has, I suspect, rendered these
sentiments in some degree popular; and I shall, therefore, examine them
at some length.

The shades in the Athenian character strike th