nt. In all honest and reflecting
minds there is a conviction, daily strengthened by experience, that the
means of effecting every improvement which the constitution requires may
be found within the constitution itself.

Now, if ever, we ought to be able to appreciate the whole importance of
the stand which was made by our forefathers against the House of Stuart.
All around us the world is convulsed by the agonies of great nations.
Governments which lately seemed likely to stand during ages have been on
a sudden shaken and overthrown. The proudest capitals of Western Europe
have streamed with civil blood. All evil passions, the thirst of gain
and the thirst of vengeance, the antipathy of class to class, the
antipathy of race to race, have broken loose from the control of divine
and human laws. Fear and anxiety have clouded the faces and depressed
the hearts of millions. Trade has been suspended, and industry
paralysed. The rich have become poor; and the poor have become poorer.
Doctrines hostile to all sciences, to all arts, to all industry, to all
domestic charities, doctrines which, if carried into effect, would, in
thirty years, undo all that thirty centuries have done for mankind,
and would make the fairest provinces of France and Germany as savage as
Congo or Patagonia, have been avowed from the tribune and defended by
the sword. Europe has been threatened with subjugation by barbarians,
compared with whom the barbarians who marched under Attila and Alboin
were enlightened and humane. The truest friends of the people have
with deep sorrow owned that interests more precious than any political
privileges were in jeopardy, and that it might be necessary to sacrifice
even liberty in order to save civilisation. Meanwhile in our island the
regular course of government has never been for a day interrupted. The
few bad men who longed for license and plunder have not had the courage
to confront for one moment the strength of a loyal nation, rallied in
firm array round a parental throne. And, if it be asked what has made us
to differ from others, the answer is that we never lost what others are
wildly and blindly seeking to regain. It is because we had a preserving
revolution in the seventeenth century that we have not had a destroying
revolution in the nineteenth. It is because we had freedom in the
midst of servitude that we have order in the midst of anarchy. For the
authority of law, for the security of property, for the p