The laws reach but a very little way.

Constitute Government how you please, infinitely the greater part of it must depend upon the exercise of powers, which are left at large to the prudence and uprightness of ministers of state.

Even all the use and potency of the laws depends upon them.

Without them, your Commonwealth is no better than _a scheme upon paper; and not a living, active, effective constitution_." Thus early in his public career had Burke seized that great antithesis which he so eloquently laboured in the long and ever memorable episode of his war against the French Revolution: the opposition between artificial arrangements in politics, and a living, active, effective organisation, formed by what he calls elsewhere in the present tract the natural strength of the kingdom, and suitable to the temper and mental habits of the people.
When he spoke of the natural strength of the kingdom, he gave no narrow or conventional account of it.

He included in the elements of that strength, besides the great peers and the leading landed gentlemen, the opulent merchants and manufacturers, and the substantial yeomanry.