_Distinctive principles of whigs and tories._--No clear understanding can be acquired of the political history of England without distinguishing, with some accuracy of definition, the two great parties of whig and tory. But this is not easy; because those denominations being sometimes applied to factions in the state, intent on their own aggrandisement, sometimes to the principles they entertained or professed, have become equivocal, and do by no means, at all periods and on all occasions, present the same sense; an ambiguity which has been increased by the lax and incorrect use of familiar language. We may consider the words, in the first instance, as expressive of a political theory or principle, applicable to the English government. They were originally employed at the time of the bill of exclusion, though the distinction of the parties they denote is evidently at least as old as the long parliament. Both of these parties, it is material to observe, agreed in the maintenance of the constitution; that is, in the administration of government by an hereditary sovereign, and in the concurrence of that sovereign with the two houses of parliament in legislation, as well as in those other institutions which have been reckoned most ancient and fundamental. A favourer of unlimited monarchy was not a tory, neither was a republican a whig. Lord Clarendon was a tory, Hobbes was not; Bishop Hoadley was a whig, Milton was not. But they differed mainly in this; that to a tory the constitution, inasmuch as it was the constitution, was an ultimate point, beyond which he never looked, and from which he thought it altogether impossible to swerve; whereas the whig deemed all forms of government subordinate to the public good, and therefore liable to change when they should cease to promote that object. Within those bounds which he, as well as his antagonist, meant not to transgress, and rejecting all unnecessary innovation, the whig had a natural tendency to political improvement, the tory an aversion to it. The one loved to descant on liberty and the rights of mankind, the other on the mischiefs of sedition and the rights of kings. Though both, as I have said, admitted a common principle, the maintenance of the constitution, yet this made the privileges of the subject, that the Crown's prerogative, his peculiar care. Hence it seemed likely that, through passion and circumstance, the tory might aid in establishing despotism, or the whig in subverting monarchy. The former was generally hostile to the liberty of the press, and to freedom of enquiry, especially in religion; the latter their friend. The principle of the one, in short, was melioration; of the other, conservation.