At popular elections the most rigorous casuists will remit a little of their severity. They will allow to a candidate some unqualified effusions in favor of freedom, without binding him to adhere to them in their utmost extent. But Mr. Burke put a more strict rule upon himself than most moralists would put upon others. At his first offering himself to Bristol, where he was almost sure he should not obtain, on that or any occasion, a single Tory vote, (in fact, he did obtain but one,) and rested wholly on the Whig interest, he thought himself bound to tell to the electors, both before and after his election, exactly what a representative they had to expect in him. "The _distinguishing_ part of our Constitution," he said, "is its liberty. To preserve that liberty inviolate is the _peculiar_ duty and _proper_ trust of a member of the House of Commons. But the liberty, the _only_ liberty, I mean is a liberty connected with _order;_ and that not only exists _with_ order and virtue, but cannot exist at all _without_ them. It inheres in good and steady government, as in _its substance and vital principle_." The liberty to which Mr. Burke declared himself attached is not French liberty. That liberty is nothing but the rein given to vice and confusion. Mr. Burke was then, as he was at the writing of his Reflections, awfully impressed with the difficulties arising from the complex state of our Constitution and our empire, and that it might require in different emergencies different sorts of exertions, and the successive call upon all the various principles which uphold and justify it. This will appear from what he said at the close of the poll.