In all its other parts, the plan of the cabal, it must be confessed, appears equally absurd and incongruous. If the war with Holland were attended with great success, and involved the subjection of the republic, such an accession of force must fall to Lewis, not to Charles: and what hopes afterwards of resisting by the greatest unanimity so mighty a monarch? How dangerous, or rather how ruinous, to depend upon his assistance against domestic discontents! If the Dutch, by their own vigor, and the assistance of allies, were able to defend themselves, and could bring the war to an equality, the French arms would be so employed abroad, that no considerable reënforcement could thence be expected to second the king’s enterprises in England. And might not the project of overawing or subduing the people be esteemed of itself sufficiently odious, without the aggravation of sacrificing that state which they regarded as their best ally, and with which, on many accounts, they were desirous of maintaining the greatest concord and strictest confederacy? Whatever views likewise might be entertained of promoting by these measures the Catholic religion, they could only tend to render all the other schemes abortive, and make them fall with inevitable ruin upon the projectors. The Catholic religion, indeed, where it is established, is better fitted than the Protestant for supporting an absolute monarchy; but would any man have bought of it as the means of acquiring arbitrary authority in England, where it was more detested than even slavery itself? It must be allowed that the difficulties, and even inconsistencies, attending the schemes of the cabal, are so numerous and obvious, that one feels at first an inclination to deny the reality of those schemes, and to suppose them entirely the chimeras of calumny and faction. But the utter impossibility of accounting, by any other hypothesis, for those strange measures embraced by the court, as well as for the numerous circumstances which accompanied them, obliges us to acknowledge, (though there remains no direct evidence of it,[*]) that a formal plan was laid for changing the religion, and subverting the constitution of England; and that the king and the ministry were in reality conspirators against the people. What is most probable in human affairs, is not always true and a very minute circumstance overlooked in our speculations, serves often to explain events which may seem the most surprising and unaccountable.