and a declaration of defects, real
or supposed, in the fundamental Constitution of your country. The first
may be cured in the individual by the motives of religion, virtue,
honour, fear, shame, or interest. Men may be made to abandon, also,
false systems by exposing their absurdity or mischievous tendency to
their own better thoughts, or to the contempt or indignation of the
public; and after all, if they should exist, and exist uncorrected, they
only disgrace individuals as fugitive opinions. But it is quite
otherwise with the frame and Constitution of the State; if that is
disgraced, patriotism is destroyed in its very source. No man has ever
willingly obeyed, much less was desirous of defending with his blood, a
mischievous and absurd scheme of government. Our first, our dearest,
most comprehensive relation, our country, is gone.

It suggests melancholy reflections, in consequence of the strange course
we have long held, that we are now no longer quarrelling about the
character, or about the conduct of men, or the tenor of measures; but we
are grown out of humour with the English Constitution itself; this is
become the object of the animosity of Englishmen. This Constitution in
former days used to be the admiration and the envy of the world; it was
the pattern for politicians; the theme of the eloquent; the meditation of
the philosopher in every part of the world. As to Englishmen, it was
their pride, their consolation. By it they lived, for it they were ready
to die. Its defects, if it had any, were partly covered by partiality,
and partly borne by prudence. Now all its excellencies are forgotten,
its faults are now forcibly dragged into day, exaggerated by every
artifice of representation. It is despised and rejected of men; and
every device and invention of ingenuity, or idleness, set up in
opposition or in preference to it. It is to this humour, and it is to
the measures growing out of it, that I set myself (I hope not alone) in
the most determined opposition. Never before did we at any time in this
country meet upon the theory of our frame of government, to sit in
judgment on the Constitution of our country, to call it as a delinquent
before us, and to accuse it of every defect and every vice; to see
whether it, an object of our veneration, even our adoration, did or did
not accord with a preconceived scheme in the minds of certain gentlemen.
Cast your eyes on the journals of Parliament. It is for