I do not
recognize in this view of things the despotism of Turkey. Nor do I
discern the character of a government that has been on the whole so
oppressive, or so corrupt, or so negligent, as to be utterly unfit _for
all reformation_. I must think such a government well deserved to have
its excellences heightened, its faults corrected, and its capacities
improved into a British Constitution.
Whoever has examined into the proceedings of that deposed government
for several years back cannot fail to have observed, amidst the
inconstancy and fluctuation natural to courts, an earnest endeavor
towards the prosperity and improvement of the country; he must admit
that it had long been employed, in some instances wholly to remove, in
many considerably to correct, the abusive practices and usages that had
prevailed in the state,--and that even the unlimited power of the
sovereign over the persons of his subjects, inconsistent, as undoubtedly
it was, with law and liberty, had yet been every day growing more
mitigated in the exercise. So far from refusing itself to reformation,
that government was open, with a censurable degree of facility, to all
sorts of projects and projectors on the subject. Rather too much
countenance was given to the spirit of innovation, which soon was turned
against those who fostered it, and ended in their ruin. It is but cold,
and no very flattering justice to that fallen monarchy, to say, that,
for many years, it trespassed more by levity and want of judgment in
several of its schemes than from any defect in diligence or in public
spirit.
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