ruinous revolutions of Spain
and Portugal during the Carlist war, would not have stained the honour
of England, and ruined the prospects of the Peninsula. Had they
pervaded the British community, the two fatal mistakes of policy in
our time, the sudden emancipation of the negro slaves in the West
Indies, and the unloosing all the bonds of government in Ireland, by
the transplantation of Anglo-Saxon institutions, and the tempered
freedom of England, into the midst of the Celtic blood and
semi-barbarous passions of Ireland, would never have been committed.
The great question at issue, in short, between Montesquieu and the
Encyclopedists, as to whether man is moulded by institutions, or
institutions by man, is the fundamental question, not only
speculative, but practical, of the age; and without correct ideas on
which, internal legislation and external policy are equally certain to
be precipitated into error, and benevolence itself to become the
parent of unbounded calamities.

And yet, if the matter be considered dispassionately, and without the
disturbing influence of human pride and democratic ambition, which
have obscured the visions of three generations of the ablest men in
Europe, it seems extraordinary how any doubt could ever have been
entertained on the subject. What are laws and institutions but the
work of men, the concentration of the national will in times past, or
at the present moment? If so, how _could_ they have arisen but from
the will of the people? It is only removing the difficulty a step
further back to say, as has so often been done, that they were
imposed, not by the will of the nation, but by the power of the
tyrants who had oppressed, or the priests who had deluded it. For who
were these tyrants or these priests? Not one in twenty thousand to the
whole community. If they were empowered and enabled to impose
arbitrary or debasing institutions, it must have been because the
immense majority devolved to them the task; because, conscious of
inability to govern themselves, or wanting the inclination to do so,
they willingly resigned themselves to the guidance and direction of
others. The Czar at St. Petersburg, the Sultaun at Constantinople, the
Emperor at Pekin, reign just as much by the national will, and in a
manner just as conformable to the national wish, as the Consuls of
Rome, the Committee of Public Salvation at Paris, or the present
constitutional Monarchs of France or England. The proof of