regenerated itself_, and is therefore without a Constitution;--that
where it cannot be produced in a visible form there is none;--that a
Constitution is a thing antecedent to government; and that the
Constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of a
people constituting a government;--that _everything_ in the English
government is the reverse of what it ought to be, and what it is said to
be in England;--that the right of war and peace resides in a metaphor
shown at the Tower for sixpence or a shilling apiece;--that it signifies
not where the right resides, whether in the crown or in Parliament; war
is the common harvest of those who participate in the division and
expenditure of public money;--that the portion of liberty enjoyed in
England is just enough to enslave a country more productively than by
despotism."

So far as to the general state of the British Constitution.--As to our
House of Lords, the chief virtual representative of our aristocracy, the
great ground and pillar of security to the landed interest, and that
main link by which it is connected with the law and the crown, these
worthy societies are pleased to tell us, that, "whether we view
aristocracy before, or behind, or sideways, or any way else,
domestically or publicly, it is still a _monster_;--that aristocracy in
France had one feature less in its countenance than what it has in some
other countries: it did not compose a body of hereditary legislators; it
was not _a corporation of aristocracy_" (for such, it seems, that
profound legislator, M. de La Fayette, describes the House of
Peers);--"that it is kept up by family tyranny and injustice;--that
there is an unnatural unfitness in aristocracy to be legislators for a
nation;--that their ideas of distributive justice are corrupted at the
very source; they begin life by trampling on all their younger brothers
and sisters, and relations of every kind, and are taught and educated
so to do;--that the idea of an hereditary legislator is as absurd as an
hereditary mathematician;--that a body holding themselves unaccountable
to anybody ought to be trusted by nobody;--that it is continuing the
uncivilized principles of governments founded in conquest, and the base
idea of man having a property in man, and governing him by a personal
right;--that aristocracy has a tendency to degenerate the human
species," &c., &c.

As to our law of primogeniture, which with few and inconsiderable
exceptio