We are resolved to keep an established church, an established monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an established democracy, each in the degree it exists, and in no greater.
[346]: The constitution of a country being once settled upon some compact, tacit or expressed, there is no power existing of force to alter it without the breach of the covenant, or the consent of all the parties.
[347]: A government of five hundred country attornies and obscure curates is not good for twenty four millions of men, though it were chosen by eight and forty millions.
As to the share of power, authority, direction, which each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society.
[348]: A true natural aristocracy is not a separate interest in the state or separable from it.... When great multitudes act together under that discipline of nature, I recognise the people.... When you separate the common sort of men from their proper chieftains so as to form them into an adverse army, I no longer know that venerable object called the people in such a disbanded race of deserters and vagabonds.
[349]: A perfect democracy is the most shameless thing in the world.... and the most fearless.
By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much and in as many ways as there are floating fancies and fashions, the whole continuity and chain of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.
[350]: The metaphysics of an undergraduate and the mathematics of an exciseman.
[351]: All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off.... Now a queen is but a woman, and a woman is but an animal.
[352]: Learning with its natural protectors and guardians will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.