y with disgust from their own national
precedents and traditions, they should have sought for principles of
government in the writings of theorists, or aped, with ignorant and
ungraceful affectation, the patriots of Athens and Rome. As little can
we wonder that the violent action of the revolutionary spirit should
have been followed by reaction equally violent, and that confusion
should speedily have engendered despotism sterner than that from which
it had sprung.

Had we been in the same situation; had Strafford succeeded in his
favourite scheme of Thorough; had he formed an army as numerous and
as well disciplined as that which, a few years later, was formed by
Cromwell; had a series of judicial decisions, similar to that which
was pronounced by the Exchequer Chamber in the case of shipmoney,
transferred to the crown the right of taxing the people; had the
Star Chamber and the High Commission continued to fine, mutilate, and
imprison every man who dared to raise his voice against the government;
had the press been as completely enslaved here as at Vienna or
at Naples; had our Kings gradually drawn to themselves the whole
legislative power; had six generations of Englishmen passed away without
a single session of parliament; and had we then at length risen up in
some moment of wild excitement against our masters, what an outbreak
would that have been! With what a crash, heard and felt to the farthest
ends of the world, would the whole vast fabric of society have fallen!
How many thousands of exiles, once the most prosperous and the most
refined members of this great community, would have begged their bread
in continental cities, or have sheltered their heads under huts of bark
in the uncleared forests of America! How often should we have seen
the pavement of London piled up in barricades, the houses dinted with
bullets, the gutters foaming with blood! How many times should we have
rushed wildly from extreme to extreme, sought refuge from anarchy in
despotism, and been again driven by despotism into anarchy! How many
years of blood and confusion would it have cost us to learn the very
rudiments of political science! How many childish theories would have
duped us! How many rude and ill poised constitutions should we have set
up, only to see them tumble down! Happy would it have been for us if
a sharp discipline of half a century had sufficed to educate us into a
capacity of enjoying true freedom.

These calamities our