no doubt at the sight of the foaming element that surrounds him; but they all give themselves over for lost when they know that the worm has penetrated into their dykes.”[86] “The floods of ungodliness have made me afraid,” says the Psalmist, but we may have even greater reason to fear when the element which is to destroy filters up from beneath. I have pondered the mournful saying of Montesquieu, “Have not Rome, Lacedæmon, and Carthage perished? So will this beautiful system of the English Constitution perish when the legislative power shall have become more corrupt than the executive.” And I ask myself with sorrow, “Can it be that my country has already begun to tread this downward path?” Doubtless when the Legislature has acted the part of a traitor in surrendering the dearest and most ancient rights of any portion of the nation into the hands of the executive, whose power it has ever been the wisdom of our laws to restrain within the strictest limits, it may be said that the legislative power has become more corrupt than that executive which is itself on the highway to corruption through this very cession into its hands of functions which it never ought to exercise. “Self-government,” Grattan truly said, “is life.” But it is so in the fullest sense only when those who govern themselves, having a voice in the making of the laws which they themselves obey, possess that life of the spirit and that enlightenment of conscience which is nourished in the purity of honourable homes and by the study of the Word of God. And who shall say that there is not still such life in England? The present crisis will test the life which there is in us; it will gauge the moral condition of our people. If it find them degenerated from the manly stature of their forefathers, who were alike the champions of God’s truth and of human liberty, then we may well speak to them the warning words of Rousseau, “Ye free nations, remember this maxim, Freedom may be acquired, but it cannot be recovered.”[87] We have but partially and for a short time lost that freedom; there is yet time to recover lost ground, to turn back the tide of corruption and slavishness[88] which will follow this false step. But the crisis is grave, the necessity for action is urgent, and, if we delay, the time for recovery will be passed; and henceforward we shall be given up, as other nations which we have seen, to the miserable alternations of raging fever and of death-like torpor, of revolution and of despotism.