the declaration of right, it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and affert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be tranfmitted to our posterity; as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right. By this means our constitution preserves an unity in so great a diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown; an inheritable peerage; and a house of commons and a people inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties, from a long line of ancestors.

This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection; or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it. A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to pofterity, who never look backward to their anceftors. Besides, the people of England well know, that the idea of inheritance furnishes a fure principle of confervation, and a sure principle of tranfmiffion; without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquifition free; but it secures what it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims, are locked fast as in a fort of family settlement; grasped as in a kind of mortmain for ever. By a constitutional

constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we tranfmit our government and our privileges, in the fame manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The inftitutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of Providence, are handed down, to us and from us, in the fame course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correfpondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenour of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain, we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophick analogy. In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestick ties; adopting our fundamental laws

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laws into the bosom of our family affections; keepa ing infeparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected cha rities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres; and our altars.

Through the fame plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts, to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other, and those no small benefits, from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the prefence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers of any diftinction. By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It carries an impofing and majestick aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its gallery of portraits; its monumental inscriptions; its records, evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our civil institu tions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men; on account of their age; and on account of those from whom they

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are defcended. All your fophifters cannot produce any thing better adapted to preferve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chofen our nature rather than our fpeculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great confervatories and magazines of our rights and privileges.

You might, if you pleased, have profited of our example, and have given to your recovered freedom a correfpondent dignity. Your privileges, though discontinued, were not lost to memory. Your conftitution, it is true, whilft you were out of poffeffion, fuffered waste and dilapidation; but you poffefsed in some parts the walls, and in all the foundations of a noble and venerable caftle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. Your constitution was suspended before it was perfected; but you had the elements of a conftitution very nearly as good as could be wished. In your old states you possessed that variety of parts corresponding with the various descriptions of which your community was happily compofed; you had all that combination, and all that opposition of interests, you had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of difcordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe. These

opposed and conflicting interests, which you conVOL. V. fidered

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sidered as so great a blemish in your old and in our present constitution, interpose a falutary check to all precipitate resolutions. They render deliberation a matter not of choice, but of neceffity; they make all change a subject of compromise, which naturally begets moderation; they produce temperaments, preventing the fore evil of harsh, crude, unqualified reformations; and rendering all the headlong exertions of arbitrary power, in the few or in the many, for ever impracticable. Through that diversity of members and interests, general liberty had as many securities as there were separate views in the several orders; whilst by preffing down the whole by the weight of a real monarchy, the separate parts would have been prevented from warping and starting from their allotted places.

You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had every thing to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising every thing that belonged to you. You fet up your trade without a capital. If the last generations of your country appeared without much luftre in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations would have realized in them a standard of