of government (those who have read that book will recollect)
is laid in a provision for our wants and in a conformity to our duties:
it is to purvey for the one, it is to enforce the other. These doctrines
do of themselves gravitate to a middle point, or to some point near a
middle. They suppose, indeed, a certain portion of liberty to be
essential to all good government; but they infer that this liberty is to
be blended into the government, to harmonize with its forms and its
rules, and to be made subordinate to its end. Those who are not with
that book are with its opposite; for there is no medium besides the
medium itself. That medium is not such because it is found there, but it
is found there because it is conformable to truth and Nature. In this we
do not follow the author, but we and the author travel together upon the
same safe and middle path.

The theory contained in his book is not to furnish principles for making
a new Constitution, but for illustrating the principles of a
Constitution already made. It is a theory drawn from the _fact_ of our
government. They who oppose it are bound to show that his theory
militates with that fact; otherwise, their quarrel is not with his book,
but with the Constitution of their country. The whole scheme of our
mixed Constitution is to prevent any one of its principles from being
carried as far as, taken by itself, and theoretically, it would go.
Allow that to be the true policy of the British system, then most of the
faults with which that system stands charged will appear to be, not
imperfections into which it has inadvertently fallen, but excellencies
which it has studiously sought. To avoid the perfections of extreme,
all its several parts are so constituted as not alone to answer their
own several ends, but also each to limit and control the others;
insomuch that, take which of the principles you please, you will find
its operation checked and stopped at a certain point. The whole movement
stands still rather than that any part should proceed beyond its
boundary. From thence it results that in the British Constitution there
is a perpetual treaty and compromise going on, sometimes openly,
sometimes with less observation. To him who contemplates the British
Constitution, as to him who contemplates the subordinate material world,
it will always be a matter of his most curious investigation to discover
the secret of this mutual limitation.

_Finita_ potestas de