_Impossibility of establishing a republic._--I can by no means agree with those who find in the character of the English nation some absolute incompatibility with a republican constitution of government. Under favouring circumstances, it seems to me not at all incredible that such a polity might have existed for many ages in great prosperity, and without violent convulsion. For the English are, as a people, little subject to those bursts of passion which inflame the more imaginative multitude of southern climates, and render them both apt for revolutions, and incapable of conducting them. Nor are they again of that sluggish and stationary temper, which chokes all desire of improvement, and even all zeal for freedom and justice, through which some free governments have degenerated into corrupt oligarchies. The most conspicuously successful experiment of republican institutions (and those far more democratical than, according to the general theory of politics, could be reconciled with perfect tranquillity) has taken place in a people of English original; and though much must here be ascribed to the peculiarly fortunate situation of the nation to which I allude, we can hardly avoid giving some weight to the good sense and well-balanced temperament, which have come in their inheritance with our laws and our language. But the establishment of free commonwealths depends much rather on temporary causes, the influence of persons and particular events, and all those intricacies in the course of Providence which we term accident, than on any general maxims that can become the basis of prior calculation. In the year 1659, it is manifest that no idea could be more chimerical than that of a republican settlement in England. The name, never familiar or venerable in English ears, was grown infinitely odious; it was associated with the tyranny of ten years, the selfish rapacity of the Rump, the hypocritical despotism of Cromwell, the arbitrary sequestrations of committee-men, the iniquitous decimations of military prefects, the sale of British citizens for slavery in the West Indies, the blood of some shed on the scaffold without legal trial, the tedious imprisonment of many with denial of the habeas corpus, the exclusion of the ancient gentry, the persecution of the Anglican church, the bacchanalian rant of sectaries, the morose preciseness of puritans, the extinction of the frank and cordial joyousness of the national character. Were the people again to endure the mockery of the good old cause, as the commonwealth's men affected to style the interests of their little faction, and be subject to Lambert's notorious want of principle, or to Vane's contempt of ordinances (a godly mode of expressing the same thing), or to Haslerig's fury, or to Harrison's fanaticism, or to the fancies of those lesser schemers, who in this utter confusion and abject state of their party, were amusing themselves with plans of perfect commonwealths, and debating whether there should be a senate as well as a representation; whether a given number should go out by rotation; and all those details of political mechanism so important in the eyes of theorists?[478] Every project of this description must have wanted what alone could give it either the pretext of legitimate existence, or the chance of permanency, popular consent; the republican party, if we exclude those who would have had a protector, and those fanatics who expected the appearance of Jesus Christ, was incalculably small; not, perhaps, amounting in the whole nation to more than a few hundred persons.