But a system
unfavourable to freedom may be so formed as considerably to exalt
the grandeur of the State, and men may find in the pride and
splendour of that prosperity some sort of consolation for the loss
of their solid privileges. Indeed, the increase of the power of the
State has often been urged by artful men, as a pretext for some
abridgment of the public liberty. But the scheme of the junto under
consideration not only strikes a palsy into every nerve of our free
constitution, but in the same degree benumbs and stupefies the whole
executive power, rendering Government in all its grand operations
languid, uncertain, ineffective, making Ministers fearful of
attempting, and incapable of executing, any useful plan of domestic
arrangement, or of foreign politics. It tends to produce neither
the security of a free Government, nor the energy of a Monarchy that
is absolute. Accordingly, the Crown has dwindled away in proportion
to the unnatural and turgid growth of this excrescence on the Court.
The interior Ministry are sensible that war is a situation which
sets in its full light the value of the hearts of a people, and they
well know that the beginning of the importance of the people must be
the end of theirs.
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