The friends of this system cannot see that the
highest aim of the true statesman is, not revolution,
but progress ; that his noblest epitaph will be that he

* Sydney Smith, dwelling on the extent to which these preten-
sions and violent changes had gone in his day (always, awkwardly,
giving fresh patronage and power to the " liberal ** Government),
very justly says, "What a lesson of violence and change to the
mass of mankind ! Do you want to accustom Englishmen to lose
all confidence in the permanence of their institutions — ^to inure them
to acts of plunder — and to draw forth all the latent villanies of hu-
man nature ? The Whig leaders are honest men, and cannot mean
this ; but these foolish and inconsistent measures are the horn-book
and infantile lessons of revolution." The real mischief is to be
traced to " the conceited rashness of experimental reasoners," who,
in their presumptuous self-conceit, and utter ignorance of the real
merits of that on which they so dogmatically pronounce, sneer at all
"adhesion to old moral land- marks ;'* at all disposition to feel "at-
tachment to the happiness we have gained from tried institutions,"
rather than to trust to " the expectation of that which is promised
by novelty and change."



PROGRESS AND REVOLUTION. 17

forwarded that progress by striving to adapt the in-
stitutions and traditions of the people to what new
circumstances have arisen ; that the most dangerous
thing in which he can indulge, and the most fatal to the
welfare and permanent prosperity of the nation, is the
disposition to novelty and new experiment. On the
contrary, being unable to comprehend those institu-
tions and the vital spirit of those traditions, they treat
them with undisguised contempt. All they can un-
derstand in them is, that they give no place to Com-
missioners and Inspectors ; therefore they must be
obsolete, and not adapted to the spirit of the age.
