as a body, they
remain neuter, unless it is made for their benefit to act. Individually,
they are a set of necessary evils; and, for the sake of the bar, the
bench, and the gibbet, require to be humoured. But any legislator who
attempts to render laws clear, concise, and explanatory, and to divest
them of the quibbles whereby these expounders--or confounders--of codes
fatten on the credulity of States and the miseries of unfortunate
millions, will necessarily encounter opposition, direct or indirect, in
every measure at all likely to reduce the influence of this most
abominable horde of human depredators. It was Necker's error to have
gone so directly to the point with the lawyers that they at once saw his
scope; and thus he himself defeated his hopes of their support, the want
of which utterly baffled all his speculations.

[The great Frederick of Prussia, on being told of the numbers of lawyers
there were in England, said he wished he had them in his country. "Why?"
some one enquired. "To do the greatest benefit in my power to
society."--"How so?"--"Why to hang one-half as an example to the other!"]

When Necker undertook to re-establish the finances, and to reform
generally the abuses in the Government, he was the most popular Minister
(Lord Chatham, when the great Pitt, excepted) in Europe. Yet his errors
were innumerable, though possessing such sound knowledge and judgment,
such a superabundance of political contrivance, diplomatic coolness, and
mathematical calculation, the result of deep thought aided by great
practical experience.

But how futile he made all these appear when he declared the national
bankruptcy. Could anything be more absurd than the assumption, by the
individual, of a personal instead of a national guarantee of part of a
national debt?--an undertaking too hazardous and by far too ambiguous,
even for a monarch who is not backed by his kingdom--flow doubly frantic,
then, for a subject! Necker imagined that the above declaration and his
own Quixotic generosity would have opened the coffers of the great body
of rich proprietors, and brought them forward to aid the national crisis.
But he was mistaken. The nation then had no interest in his financial
system. The effect it produced was the very reverse of what was
expected. Every proprietor began to fear the ambition of the Minister,
who undertook impossibilities. The being bound for the debts of an
individual, and justifying bail in a