Let me inform him, that it was one of the
most critical periods in our annals.
Astronomers have supposed, that, if a certain comet, whose path
intersected the ecliptic, had met the earth in some (I forgot what)
sign, it would have whirled us along with it, in its eccentric course,
into God knows what regions of heat and cold. Had the portentous comet
of the Rights of Man, (which "from its horrid hair shakes pestilence and
war," and "with fear of change perplexes monarchs,") had that comet
crossed upon us in that internal state of England, nothing human could
have prevented our being irresistibly hurried out of the highway of
heaven into all the vices, crimes, horrors, and miseries of the French
Revolution.
Happily, France was not then Jacobinized. Her hostility was at a good
distance. We had a limb cut off, but we preserved the body: we lost our
colonies, but we kept our Constitution. There was, indeed, much
intestine heat; there was a dreadful fermentation. Wild and savage
insurrection quitted the woods, and prowled about our streets in the
name of Reform. Such was the distemper of the public mind, that there
was no madman, in his maddest ideas and maddest projects, who might not
count upon numbers to support his principles and execute his designs.
Many of the changes, by a great misnomer called Parliamentary Reforms,
went, not in the intention of all the professors and supporters of them,
undoubtedly, but went in their certain, and, in my opinion, not very
remote effect, home to the utter destruction of the Constitution of this
kingdom.
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