It is not a sufficient equivalent, or safeguard to popular liberty, to be able merely to dismiss from office a Minister of the Crown who has by his administrative blunders brought citizens to death and property to destruction, or who has sedulously manufactured criminals out of a class whose will is to be law-abiding. He, if anybody, deserves punishment; and Parliaments (backed by whatever majority) which, through maintaining political inequalities, produce such results, are under the same condemnation. The _onus probandi_ of their beneficence rests upon them; and if, commissioned to secure peace and order, they produce only unrest and disorder, then the proof is against them. Listen to these remarkable words by so great a supporter of constitutional authority as Edmund Burke: “Nations,” he says, “are not primarily ruled by laws, still less by violence. Whatever original energy may be supposed in force or regulation, the operation of both is, in truth, merely instrumental. Nations are governed by the same methods and on the same principles by which an individual without authority is often able to govern those who are his equals or his superiors--by a knowledge of their temper, and by a judicious management of it. I mean--when public affairs are steadily and quietly conducted: not when government is nothing but a continued scuffle between the magistrate and the multitude, in which sometimes one and sometimes the other is uppermost, in which they alternately yield and prevail in a series of contemptible victories and scandalous submissions. The temper of the people amongst whom he presides ought, therefore, to be the first study of the statesman. And the knowledge of this temper it is by no means impossible for him to attain, if he has not an interest in being ignorant of what it is his duty to learn.” And further on he says: “In all disputes between them (the governed) and their rulers, the presumption is at least upon a par in favour of the people. Experience may perhaps justify me in going further. When popular discontents have been very prevalent, it may well be affirmed that there has been something found amiss in the constitution or in the conduct of government. The people have no interest in disorder. When they do wrong, it is their error and not their crime. But with the governing part of the State it is far otherwise. They certainly may act ill by design as well as by mistake.... And if this presumption in favour of the subject against the trustees of power be not the more probable, I am sure it is the more comfortable speculation; because it is more easy to change an administration than to reform a people.”