nfluences create the nation--these form the national mind, and
produce in the course of centuries a high degree of civilisation. If you
destroy the political institutions which these influences have called
into force, and which are the machinery by which they constantly
act, you destroy the nation. The nation, in a state of anarchy and
dissolution, then becomes a people; and after experiencing all the
consequent misery, like a company of bees spoiled of their queen and
rifled of their hive, they set to again and establish themselves into a
society.

Although all society is artificial, the most artificial society in the
world is unquestionably the English nation. Our insular situation and
our foreign empire, our immense accumulated wealth and our industrious
character, our peculiar religious state, which secures alike orthodoxy
and toleration, our church and our sects, our agriculture and our
manufactures, our military services, our statute law, and supplementary
equity, our adventurous commerce, landed tenure, and unprecedented
system of credit, form, among many others, such a variety of interests,
and apparently so conflicting, that I do not think even the Abbe Sieyes
himself could devise a scheme by which this nation could be absolutely
and definitely represented.

The framers of the English constitution were fortunately not of the
school of Abbe Sieyes. Their first object was to make us free; their
next to keep us so. While, therefore, they selected equality as the
basis of their social order, they took care to blend every man's
ambition with the perpetuity of the State. Unlike the levelling equality
of modern days, the ancient equality of England elevates and creates.
Learned in human nature, the English constitution holds out privilege
to every subject as the inducement to do his duty. As it has secured
freedom, justice, and even property to the humblest of the commonwealth,
so, pursuing the same system of privileges, it has confided the
legislature of the realm to two orders of the subjects--orders, however,
in which every English citizen may be constitutionally enrolled--the
Lords and the Commons. The two estates of the Peers are personally
summoned to meet in their chamber: the more extensive and single estate
of the Commons meets by its representatives. Both are political orders,
complete in their character, independent in their authority, legally
irresponsible for the exercise of their power. But they are the