istance must begin, is faint, obscure, and not easily definable. It
is not a single act or a single event which determines it. Governments
must be abused and deranged indeed, before it can be thought of; and the
prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past.
When things are in that lamentable condition, the nature of the disease
is to indicate the remedy to those whom Nature has qualified to
administer in extremities this critical, ambiguous, bitter potion to a
distempered state. Times and occasions and provocations will teach their
own lessons. The wise will determine from the gravity of the case; the
irritable, from sensibility to oppression; the high-minded, from disdain
and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands; the brave and bold,
from the love of honorable danger in a generous cause: but, with or
without right, a revolution will be the very last resource of the
thinking and the good.

* * * * *

The third head of right asserted by the pulpit of the Old Jewry, namely,
the "right to form a government for ourselves," has, at least, as little
countenance from anything done at the Revolution, either in precedent or
principle, as the two first of their claims. The Revolution was made to
preserve our _ancient_ indisputable laws and liberties, and that
_ancient_ constitution of government which is our only security for law
and liberty. If you are desirous of knowing the spirit of our
Constitution, and the policy which predominated in that great period
which has secured it to this hour, pray look for both in our histories,
in our records, in our acts of Parliament and journals of Parliament,
and not in the sermons of the Old Jewry, and the after-dinner toasts of
the Revolution Society. In the former you will find other ideas and
another language. Such a claim is as ill-suited to our temper and wishes
as it is unsupported by any appearance of authority. The very idea of
the fabrication of a new government is enough to fill us with disgust
and horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish,
to derive all we possess as _an inheritance from our forefathers_. Upon
that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate
any scion alien to the nature of the original plant. All the
reformations we have hitherto made have proceeded upon the principle of
reference to antiquity; and I hope, nay, I am persuaded, that all those
which possi