the declaration of right, it has been the uniform policy of our conftitution to claim and affert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted 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 conftitution 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 refult of profound reflection; or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it. A fpirit of innovation is generally the refult 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 fure principle of tranfmiffion; without at all excluding a principle of improvement. It leaves acquifition free; but it fecures what it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on these maxims, are locked faft as in a fort of family fettlement; grasped as in a kind of mortmain for ever. By a conftitutional

conftitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the fame manner in which we enjoy and tranfmit 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 courfe and order. Our political system is placed in a just correfpondence and fymmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts; wherein, by the difpofition 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 conftancy, moves on through the varied tenour of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progreffion. Thus, by preferving 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 obfolete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are guided not by the fuperftition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philofophick analogy. In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the conftitution of our country with our dearest domestick ties; adopting our fundamental

law's

laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping 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 na ture 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 feveral other, and those no small benefits, from confidering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the fpirit of freedom, leading in itself to mifrule and excefs, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal defcent infpires us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents that up. ftart infolence 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 afpect. It has a pedigree and illustrating an ceftors. It has its bearings and its enfigns armorial. It has its gallery of portraits; its monumental inscriptions; its records, evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our civil inftitutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men; on account of their age; and on account of thofe from whom they

are

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 speculations, 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 correspondent dignity. Your privileges, though discontinued, were not loft to memory. Your conftitution, it is true, whilft you were out of poffeffion, suffered waste and dilapidation; but you poffeffed in fome parts the walls, and in all the foundations of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on thofe old foundations. Your conftitution was fufpended 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 poffeffed that variety of parts correfponding with the various defcriptions of which your community was happily compofed; you had all that combination, and all that opposition of interefts, 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 oppofed and conflicting interefts, which you confidered

VOL. V.

G

fidered as fo great a blemish in your old and in our prefent conftitution, 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 compromife, 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 diverfity of members and interests, general liberty had as many fecurities as there were separate views in the feveral orders; whilst by preffing down the whole by the weight of a real monarchy, the feparate parts would have been prevented from warping and starting from their allotted places.

.

You had all thefe advantages in your ancient ftates; but you chofe to act as if you had never been moulded into civil fociety, and had every thing to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by defpifing every thing that belonged to you. You fet up your trade without a capital. If the laft generations of your country appeared without much luftre in your eyes, you might have paffed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a pious predilection for thofe ancestors, your imaginations would have realized in them a ftandard of