run the risk of a decision which may be fatal to it. They who
can read the political sky will seen a hurricane in a cloud no bigger
than a hand at the very edge of the horizon, and will run into the first
harbour. No lines can be laid down for civil or political wisdom. They
are a matter incapable of exact definition. But, though no man can draw
a stroke between the confines of day and night, yet light and darkness
are upon the whole tolerably distinguishable. Nor will it be impossible
for a Prince to find out such a mode of government, and such persons to
administer it, as will give a great degree of content to his people,
without any curious and anxious research for that abstract, universal,
perfect harmony, which, while he is seeking, he abandons those means of
ordinary tranquillity which are in his power without any research at all.

It is not more the duty than it is the interest of a Prince to aim at
giving tranquillity to his Government. If those who advise him may have
an interest in disorder and confusion. If the opinion of the people is
against them, they will naturally wish that it should have no prevalence.
Here it is that the people must on their part show themselves sensible of
their own value. Their whole importance, in the first instance, and
afterwards their whole freedom, is at stake. Their freedom cannot long
survive their importance. Here it is that the natural strength of the
kingdom, the great peers, the leading landed gentlemen, the opulent
merchants and manufacturers, the substantial yeomanry, must interpose, to
rescue their Prince, themselves, and their posterity.

We are at present at issue upon this point. We are in the great crisis
of this contention, and the part which men take, one way or other, will
serve to discriminate their characters and their principles. Until the
matter is decided, the country will remain in its present confusion. For
while a system of Administration is attempted, entirely repugnant to the
genius of the people, and not conformable to the plan of their
Government, everything must necessarily be disordered for a time, until
this system destroys the constitution, or the constitution gets the
better of this system.

There is, in my opinion, a peculiar venom and malignity in this political
distemper beyond any that I have heard or read of. In former lines the
projectors of arbitrary Government attacked only the liberties of their
country, a design surely mi