ty was at a good
distance. We had a limb cut off, but we preserved the body: we lost our
colonies, but we kept our Constitution. There was, indeed, much
intestine heat; there was a dreadful fermentation. Wild and savage
insurrection quitted the woods, and prowled about our streets in the
name of Reform. Such was the distemper of the public mind, that there
was no madman, in his maddest ideas and maddest projects, who might not
count upon numbers to support his principles and execute his designs.

Many of the changes, by a great misnomer called Parliamentary Reforms,
went, not in the intention of all the professors and supporters of them,
undoubtedly, but went in their certain, and, in my opinion, not very
remote effect, home to the utter destruction of the Constitution of this
kingdom. Had they taken place, not France, but England, would have had
the honor of leading up the death-dance of democratic revolution. Other
projects, exactly coincident in time with those, struck at the very
existence of the kingdom under any Constitution. There are who remember
the blind fury of some and the lamentable helplessness of others; here,
a torpid confusion, from a panic fear of the danger,--there, the same
inaction, from a stupid insensibility to it; here, well-wishers to the
mischief,--there, indifferent lookers-on. At the same time, a sort of
National Convention, dubious in its nature and perilous in its example,
nosed Parliament in the very seat of its authority,--sat with a sort of
superintendence over it,--and little less than dictated to it, not only
laws, but the very form and essence of legislature itself. In Ireland
things ran in a still more eccentric course. Government was unnerved,
confounded, and in a manner suspended. Its equipoise was totally gone. I
do not mean to speak disrespectfully of Lord North. He was a man of
admirable parts, of general knowledge, of a versatile understanding
fitted for every sort of business, of infinite wit and pleasantry, of a
delightful temper, and with a mind most perfectly disinterested. But it
would be only to degrade myself by a weak adulation, and not to honor
the memory of a great man, to deny that he wanted something of the
vigilance and spirit of command that the time required. Indeed, a
darkness next to the fog of this awful day lowered over the whole
region. For a little time the helm appeared abandoned.

Ipse diem noctemque negat discernere coelo,
Nec meminisse viae med