e person or other) every
reform must operate as a sort of punishment. Indeed, the whole class of
the severe and restrictive virtues are at a market almost too high for
humanity. What is worse, there are very few of those virtues which are
not capable of being imitated, and even outdone in many of their most
striking effects, by the worst of vices. Malignity and envy will carve
much more deeply, and finish much more sharply, in the work of
retrenchment, than frugality and providence. I do not, therefore, wonder
that gentlemen have kept away from such a task, as well from good-nature
as from prudence. Private feeling might, indeed, be overborne by
legislative reason; and a man of a long-sighted and a strong-nerved
humanity might bring himself not so much to consider from whom he takes
a superfluous enjoyment as for whom in the end he may preserve the
absolute necessaries of life.

But it is much more easy to reconcile this measure in humanity than to
bring it to any agreement with prudence. I do not mean that little,
selfish, pitiful, bastard thing which sometimes goes by the name of a
family in which it is not legitimate and to which it is a disgrace;--I
mean even that public and enlarged prudence, which, apprehensive of
being disabled from rendering acceptable services to the world,
withholds itself from those that are invidious. Gentlemen who are, with
me, verging towards the decline of life, and are apt to form their ideas
of kings from kings of former times, might dread the anger of a reigning
prince;--they who are more provident of the future, or by being young
are more interested in it, might tremble at the resentment of the
successor; they might see a long, dull, dreary, unvaried visto of
despair and exclusion, for half a century, before them. This is no
pleasant prospect at the outset of a political journey.

Besides this, Sir, the private enemies to be made in all attempts of
this kind are innumerable; and their enmity will be the more bitter, and
the more dangerous too, because a sense of dignity will oblige them to
conceal the cause of their resentment. Very few men of great families
and extensive connections but will feel the smart of a cutting reform,
in some close relation, some bosom friend, some pleasant acquaintance,
some dear, protected dependant. Emolument is taken from some; patronage
from others; objects of pursuit from all. Men forced into an involuntary
independence will abhor the authors of a ble