he chance of war, they would be treated with another sort of
triumphal entry into London. We formerly have had a king of France in
that situation; you have read how he was received in England. Four
hundred years have gone over us; but I believe we are not materially
changed since that period. We have not lost the generosity and dignity
of thinking of the fourteenth century; nor as yet have we subtilised
ourselves into savages.

We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like
stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds
of paper about the rights of man. We have real hearts of flesh and blood
beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings, with
affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to
priests, and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are
brought before our minds it is natural to be so affected; because all
other feelings are false and spurious, and tend to corrupt our minds, to
vitiate our primary morals, to render us unfit for rational liberty; and
by teaching us a servile insolence, to be our low sport for a few
holidays, to make us perfectly fit for, and justly deserving of, slavery
through the whole course of our lives.

_V.--Principles of Statesmanship_

One of the first principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are
consecrated is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it
should act as it they were the entire masters, hazarding to leave to
those who come after them a ruin instead of an habitation. By this
unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and in as many
ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole continuity of
the commonwealth would be broken. Men would become little better than
the flies in summer.

First of all, the science of jurisprudence, the pride of the human
intellect, which, with all its defects, redundances, and errors, is the
collected reason of ages, combining the principles of original justice
with the infinite variety of human concerns, would be no longer studied.
No certain laws, establishing invariable grounds of hope and fear, would
keep the actions of men in a certain course.

No principles would be early worked into the habits. Who would ensure a
tender and delicate sense of honour, to beat almost with the first
pulses of the heart, when no man could know what would be the test of
honour in a nation continually varying the