ure of power,
in domestic government. The disasters of Affghanistan, the shaking of our
power in India, the abortive first two years' hostilities with China, show
with what dreadful danger it was attended to our external power and even
national existence.

We have said that it is the decisive mark of a party writer to ascribe
political and private vices to his opponents, from which he represents his
own side as exempt; and we have immediately afterwards said, that the
wide-spread corruption, and constant promotion of influential imbecility,
which, ever since 1688, has been the bane of Great Britain, and the chief,
if not the sole, cause of all the disasters we have undergone, and of
nine-tenths of the debts we have contracted, is mainly to be ascribed to
the Whigs, who, during the long period of seventy years, immediately
subsequent to the Revolution, were exclusively in power, and had the
entire moulding of the constitution, both in church and state, in their
hands. Having taken the mote out of our neighbour's eye, we proceed to
take the beam out of our own. We hasten to show that we do not ascribe
greater political baseness to one party than another. We will not follow
the example of Walpole, who represents Chatham, and all his Whig
followers, as patriotic angels; Bute, and all his Tory supporters, as
selfish devils. We assume it as the basis of all just or rational
historical discussion, that, though there may be a wide and most important
difference in the beneficial or ruinous effects with which their measures
are attended, the real character, the moral purity of the motives, of men
of opposite parties, in the same age, is much alike. There is, indeed, a
wide difference in the virtue and public spirit of different ages, and of
men in the same community, under different circumstances; but in the same
age, and under the same circumstances, they are very like similar.

The patriotism of Regulus and Fabricius was very different from that which
followed the insurrection of the Gracchi; but Sylla and Marius, Caesar and
Pompey, differed, if their real motives are considered, very little from
each other. The same result would probably have followed the triumphs of
either. There is no such thing as all the sheep being on one side and all
the goats on another, in the same country at the same time. The proportion
of good and bad men, of generous and base motives, among the Roundheads
and Cavaliers, was much the same. The cabal