We must examine the error that was committed, in giving the countenance of Great Britain, as a protecting power, to the absurd constitution established in 1844; and while we blame what was then badly done, we shall point out what common sense, when not warped by party interests, dictated ought to have been done. Of course, we can only offer the suggestions urged by a wise minority at Athens. The nation, in making the revolution in 1843, did not want a constitution, for they possessed institutions which a written constitution is only valuable as a means of attaining. The Greeks, as we have said before, sought to reform the system of administration. The method of carrying on the executive government, under the hourly control of an elective chamber, called constitutional government, was forced upon them by accident, as France lately became a republic. Without the assistance of this _pons asinorum_ of French politicians, the Greeks had saved the liberty of the press from the attacks of Count Armansperg, and established trial by jury in spite of Austria and Russia. The constitutional system of government, as it has laid hold of the public mind on the Continent, is a very imperfect political contrivance: practically, it has proved a delusion—a mere form, figured in empty space by a mass of thick clouds, impelled hither and thither by unseen currents of wind, the precursor of an approaching storm, not the source of beneficial showers. When examined in detail, with its tribunes; its orators, pamphlet in hand; its galleries, and its ministers playing at see-saw between social democracy and court corruption, what hope does it hold out of establishing a sense of moral responsibility and firmness of purpose in individual statesmen, or the deep conviction that creates patriotic feeling, and the power of self-sacrifice, in a whole people? What collection of men, chosen by a mob which can never hear the names of the wisest and best in their immediate vicinity, can, in the actual state of education, morality, and religion, either possess the qualifications necessary to make laws, or the experience required to control and direct the executive government? English institutions, or what we call, in conversation, the English constitution, is even now something totally different from this spawn of modern political quackery. Yet even among men of education, at home as well as among demagogues and itinerant orators, we now find some who pretend that our political system would be improved by allowing Gregory the poacher, and Herman the tinker, to take an active share in legislation, by the adoption of universal suffrage, annual Parliaments, and the vote by ballot. We doubt whether a British _Codex Gregorianus_ or _Hermogenianus_, so framed, would do our country much honour. Things are bad enough as they are. We already make laws faster than lawyers can read them; and the electors care very little about the legislative labours of the elected.