In your old states you possessed that variety
of parts corresponding with the various descriptions of which your
community was happily composed; 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 discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the
universe. These opposed and conflicting interests which you considered
as so great a blemish in your old and in our present constitution
interpose a salutary check to all precipitate resolutions. They render
deliberation a matter, not of choice, but of necessity; they make
all change a subject of compromise, which naturally begets moderation;
they produce temperaments preventing the sore 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 pressing 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 molded into civil society and had
everything to begin anew.
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