But admitting democracy not to have that inevitable tendency to party tyranny which I suppose it to have, and admitting it to possess as much good in it when unmixed as I am sure it possesses when compounded with other forms; does monarchy, on its part, contain nothing at all to recommend it?  I do not often quote Bolingbroke, nor have his works in general left any permanent impression on my mind.  He is a presumptuous and a superficial writer.  But he has one observation which in my opinion is not without depth and solidity.  He says that he prefers a monarchy to other governments, because you can better ingraft any description of republic on a monarchy than anything of monarchy upon the republican forms.  I think him perfectly in the right.  The fact is so historically, and it agrees well with the speculation.

I know how easy a topic it is to dwell on the faults of departed greatness.  By a revolution in the state, the fawning sycophant of yesterday is converted into the austere critic of the present hour.  But steady, independent minds, when they have an object of so serious a concern to mankind as government under their contemplation, will disdain to assume the part of satirists and declaimers.  They will judge of human institutions as they do of human characters.  They will sort out the good from the evil, which is mixed in mortal institutions as it is in mortal men.

Your government in France, though usually, and I think justly, reputed the best of the unqualified or ill-qualified monarchies, was still full of abuses.  These abuses accumulated in a length of time, as they must accumulate in every monarchy not under the constant inspection of a popular representative.  I am no stranger to the faults and defects of the subverted government of France; and I think I am not inclined by nature or policy to make a panegyric upon anything which is a just and natural object of censure.  But the question is not now of the vices of that monarchy, but of its existence.  Is it, then, true, that the French government was such as to be incapable or undeserving of reform, so that it was of absolute necessity the whole fabric should be at once pulled down, and the area cleared for the erection of a theoretic, experimental edifice in its place?  All France was of a different opinion in the beginning of the year 1789.  The instructions to the representatives to the States-General, from every district in that kingdom, were filled with projects for the reformation of that government, without the remotest suggestion of a design to destroy it.  Had such a design been then even insinuated, I believe there would have been but one voice, and that voice for rejecting it with scorn and horror.  Men have been sometimes led by degrees, sometimes hurried, into things of which, if they could have seen the whole together, they never would have permitted the most remote approach.  When those instructions were given, there was no question but that abuses existed, and that they demanded a reform:  nor is there now.  In the interval between the instructions and the Revolution things changed their shape; and in consequence of that change, the true question at present is, whether those who would have reformed or those who have destroyed are in the right.