of maintaining and amplifying Parliamentary institutions in the midst of a various, and, at the bottom of the social scale, ignorant and poor nation; it brings out unmistakably the fact that our constitution is not based on equality, or on an avowed and graduated adjustment to intelligence and property; but upon certain ancient feelings of deference and a strange approximate mode of representing sense and mind, neither of which must be roughly handled, for if spoiled they can never be remade, and they are the only supports possible of a polity such as ours, in a people such as ours.

And thus I may fitly, perhaps, close these essays on the English Constitution. They will have served their purpose if they assist to break up obsolete traditions on an important subject; if they induce others to treat it according to the sight of their eyes, and not according to the hearing of their ears; if even by their errors they should stir some great thinker to embody the experience of England so as to be useful to mankind.