While they are men of
property, it is impossible to prevent it, except by such means as
must prevent all property from its natural operation: an event not
easily to be compassed, while property is power; nor by any means to
be wished, while the least notion exists of the method by which the
spirit of liberty acts, and of the means by which it is preserved.
If any particular Peers, by their uniform, upright, constitutional
conduct, by their public and their private virtues, have acquired an
influence in the country; the people on whose favour that influence
depends, and from whom it arose, will never be duped into an
opinion, that such greatness in a Peer is the despotism of an
aristocracy, when they know and feel it to be the effect and pledge
of their own importance.
I am no friend to aristocracy, in the sense at least in which that
word is usually understood. If it were not a bad habit to moot
cases on the supposed ruin of the constitution, I should be free to
declare, that if it must perish, I would rather by far see it
resolved into any other form, than lost in that austere and insolent
domination. But, whatever my dislikes may be, my fears are not upon
that quarter.
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