ot
merely passive, but submissive actions," said he, "after yielding one
member of the Council to the Tower, and another to the block, from which
even a King's prayer, for a friend and servant, could not procure
unhappy Wentworth a day's respite, His Majesty did, I must own, adopt
rash counsels. But it is not their illegality so much as his weakness in
threatening when he wanted strength to punish, that I condemn. If your
objection to the royal cause be founded on the distraction and
imbecility that have marked the measures by which it has been supported,
I must cease to rouse your dormant loyalty. It is not in the defenceless
tents of our Prince that we must seek for safety; we must leave him to
his fate, on the same principle that we abandon a naked child to the
attacks of a man clad in complete armour."

Dr. Beaumont now took part in the debate. "If," said he, "we look back
to the original pretences of those who set out as reformers, I think we
shall be able to form a clear decision as to the part we ourselves
should act, where the confusion they labour to excite has actually
commenced. They first unsettle our obedience by discovering what they
call the iniquity of our governors; and indeed it is not difficult for
those who look with a malignant eye on their conduct to perceive such
errors, or, if you will, vices, as an artful and censorious temper may
dress up into glaring enormities, especially if it deals in those
exaggerations which people, who give up their understandings to the
views of a party, call true representations. The man of dullest
intellect can discover faults in extensive complicated systems, and the
more he confines his view, the more must he see matters in detail, and
not in their general tendency. Yet these illiberal censors are sure to
be regarded, because in all countries the majority of the people (I mean
such as are uninformed) wish for nothing so much as to be their own
masters, which they suppose will be the immediate consequence of
overthrowing the existing system. A reformer thus sets off with every
possible advantage, with an auditory predisposed to listen, and a fair
field for censure, in which malice and ingenuity have space to
expatiate; nor can his own pretensions to purity and wisdom at first be
questioned, for as he generally rises from an obscure station, his
former conduct is not known, and the glibness of his oratory, and the
popularity of his topics, gain him ample credence for