these books contain nothing more than a parcel of crude maxims, or the idle dreams of unpractised pedants and schoolmen; declamations on liberty, which any man in this country may learn at his leisure, in the first company he chances to meet, over a dish of coffee, or over a bottle; general arguments in behalf of the rights of mankind, which, according to Cicero, every man is taught by instinct; Est igitur hæc judices non scripta, sed nata lex, quam non didicimus, accipimus, legimus; verùm ex naturâ ipsâ, arripuimus, hausimus, expressimus; and the visions of vain projectors, stuffed with ridiculous notions, and impracticable doctrines; such as that it may not be altogether safe nor proper for the whole body of a great nation, any more than for any private person, to eat or drink, or sleep, or dress, or sing, or dance, or game too much: that it is possible, even for a maritime power, to carry on too much trade: that drunkenness, adultery, bribing, and perjury, at elections, are not very commendable practices: that even annual parliaments, nevertheless, may be more eligible than septennial ones, especially as many of its members may happen to learn as much of the business of the senate at the end of six months as at the conclusion of seven years: that a standing army, in time of peace, may be dangerous to liberty, unless it should be voted by the legislative power, although the officers who composed it were forty times more valiant than the rest of their fellow-subjects, and just as honest and virtuous as ninety-nine in a hundred of them; tamen miserrimum est posse si velit: that a militia cannot well be too numerous, even though the consumption of silk, or velvet, or lace, or ribbands, or trinkets, should be thereby considerably diminished, and even though it should be necessary to discipline it on the seventh day of every week: that it may be possible in the nature of things for large fleets to transport armies an hundred miles, and land them safely within sixty miles of a great, unwarlike, and defenceless capital: that the king, even of a free people, may be legally and constitutionally possessed of certain instruments, engines, and powers, of unfailing efficacy, in times of general depravity; by means of which, if he chance, instead of being the friend and father of his people, to be wicked, an usurper, and a tyrant, he may gain over, to any purpose he pleases, the souls and bodies of three-fourths of them: that a free people, not clearly discerning the reciprocal duties of protection and obedience, and prone to confound the frenzy of sedition with the modesty of true liberty, may, peradventure, tumultuously and violently obstruct the execution of the known laws of the land, madly insult, in the public streets, a prince devoted to their happiness, threaten to blow out the brains of his friends and servants, and attempt to overawe the senate, in the very midst of their public deliberations: that some care should