they are
descended. All your sophisters cannot produce anything better adapted to
preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have
pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our
breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and
magazines of our rights and privileges.

* * * * *

You might, if you pleased, have profited of our example, and have given
to your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity. Your privileges,
though discontinued, were not lost to memory. Your Constitution, it is
true, whilst you were out of possession, suffered waste and
dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls, and in all the
foundations, of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired
those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. Your
Constitution was suspended before it was perfected; but you had the
elements of a Constitution very nearly as good as could be wished. In
your old states you possessed that variety of parts corresponding with
the various descriptions of which your community was happily composed;
you had all that combination and all that opposition of interests, you
had that action and counteraction, which, in the natural and in the
political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers draws
out the harmony of the universe. These opposed and conflicting
interests, which you considered as so great a blemish in your old and in
our present Constitution, interpose a salutary check to all precipitate
resolutions. They render deliberation a matter, not of choice, but of
necessity; they make all change a subject of _compromise_, which
naturally begets moderation; they produce _temperaments_, preventing the
sore evil of harsh, crude, unqualified reformations, and rendering all
the headlong exertions of arbitrary power, in the few or in the many,
forever impracticable. Through that diversity of members and interests,
general liberty had as many securities as there were separate views in
the several orders; whilst by pressing down the whole by the weight of a
real monarchy, the separate parts would have been prevented from warping
and starting from their allotted places.

You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to
act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had
everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising
everything that belonged