served his greatness, he
endured his person. When George the Second took Mr. Pitt, who certainly
was not agreeable to him, into his councils, he did nothing which could
humble a wise sovereign. But these ministers, who were chosen by
affairs, not by affections, acted in the name of and in trust for kings,
and not as their avowed constitutional and ostensible masters. I think
it impossible that any king, when he has recovered his first terrors,
can cordially infuse vivacity and vigor into measures which he knows to
be dictated by those who, he must be persuaded, are in the highest
degree ill affected to his person. Will any ministers, who serve such a
king (or whatever he may be called) with but a decent appearance of
respect, cordially obey the orders of those whom but the other day in
his name they had committed to the Bastile? will they obey the orders
of those whom, whilst they were exercising despotic justice upon them,
they conceived they were treating with lenity, and for whom in a prison
they thought they had provided an asylum? If you expect such obedience,
amongst your other innovations and regenerations, you ought to make a
revolution in Nature, and provide a new constitution, for the human
mind: otherwise your supreme government cannot harmonize with its
executory system. There are cases in which we cannot take up with names
and abstractions. You may call half a dozen leading individuals, whom we
have reason to fear and hate, the nation. It makes no other difference
than to make us fear and hate them the more. If it had been thought
justifiable and expedient to make such a revolution by such means and
through such persons as you have made yours, it would have been more
wise to have completed the business of the fifth and sixth of October.
The new executive officer would then owe his situation to those who are
his creators as well as his masters; and he might be bound in interest,
in the society of crime, and (if in crimes there could be virtues) in
gratitude, to serve those who had promoted him to a place of great lucre
and great sensual indulgence,--and of something more: for more he must
have received from those who certainly would not have limited an
aggrandized creature as they have done a submitting antagonist.

A king circumstanced as the present, if he is totally stupefied by his
misfortunes, so as to think it not the necessity, but the premium and
privilege of life, to eat and sleep, without any regard