If others, however, have obtained any of this extraordinary light, they will use it to guide them in their researches and their conduct.  I have only to wish that the nation may be as happy and as prosperous under the influence of the new light as it has been in the sober shade of the old obscurity.  As to the rest, it will be difficult for the author of the Reflections to conform to the principles of the avowed leaders of the party, until they appear otherwise than negatively.  All we can gather from them is this,—­that their principles are diametrically opposite to his.  This is all that we know from authority.  Their negative declaration obliges me to have recourse to the books which contain positive doctrines.  They are, indeed, to those Mr. Burke holds diametrically opposite; and if it be true (as the oracles of the party have said, I hope hastily) that their opinions differ so widely, it should seem they are the most likely to form the creed of the modern Whigs.

* * * * *

I have stated what were the avowed sentiments of the old Whigs, not in the way of argument, but narratively.  It is but fair to set before the reader, in the same simple manner, the sentiments of the modern, to which they spare neither pains nor expense to make proselytes.  I choose them from the books upon which most of that industry and expenditure in circulation have been employed; I choose them, not from those who speak with a politic obscurity, not from those who only controvert the opinions of the old Whigs, without advancing any of their own, but from those who speak plainly and affirmatively.  The Whig reader may make his choice between the two doctrines.

The doctrine, then, propagated by these societies, which gentlemen think they ought to be very tender in discouraging, as nearly as possible in their own words, is as follows:  That in Great Britain we are not only without a good Constitution, but that we have “no Constitution";—­that, “though it is much talked about, no such thing as a Constitution exists or ever did exist, and consequently that the people have a Constitution yet to form;—­that since William the Conqueror the country has never yet regenerated itself, and is therefore without a Constitution;—­that where it cannot be produced in a visible form there is none;—­that a Constitution is a thing antecedent to government; and that the Constitution of a country is not the act of its government, but of a people constituting a government;—­that everything in the English government is the reverse of what it ought to be, and what it is said to be in England;—­that the right of war and peace resides in a metaphor shown at the Tower for sixpence or a shilling apiece;—­that it signifies not where the right resides, whether in the crown or in Parliament; war is the common harvest of those who participate in the division and expenditure of public money;—­that the portion of liberty enjoyed in England is just enough to enslave a country more productively than by despotism.”