It may be well doubted, whether a liberal policy with regard to our commercial relations would find any support from a parliament elected by universal suffrage.

The republicans on the other side of the Atlantic have recently adopted regulations of which the consequences will, before long, show us, "How nations sink, by darling schemes oppressed, When vengeance listens to the fool's request." The people are to be governed for their own good; and, that they may be governed for their own good, they must not be governed by their own ignorance.

There are countries in which it would be as absurd to establish popular government as to abolish all the restraints in a school, or to untie all the strait-waistcoats in a madhouse.
Hence it may be concluded that the happiest state of society is that in which supreme power resides in the whole body of a well-informed people.
This is an imaginary, perhaps an unattainable, state of things.

Yet, in some measure, we may approximate to it; and he alone deserves the name of a great statesman, whose principle it is to extend the power of the people in proportion to the extent of their knowledge, and to give them every facility for obtaining such a degree of knowledge as may render it safe to trust them with absolute power.

In the mean time, it is dangerous to praise or condemn constitutions in the abstract; since, from the despotism of St Petersburg to the democracy of Washington, there is scarcely a form of government which might not, at least in some hypothetical case, be the best possible.
If, however, there be any form of government which in all ages and all nations has always been, and must always be, pernicious, it is certainly that which Mr Mitford, on his usual principle of being wiser than all the rest of the world, has taken under his especial patronage--pure oligarchy.