sacred and profane, I behold in all this some|thing which awes and commands the imagination, which checks the mind on the brink of precipi|tate and indiscriminate censure, and which de|mands, that we should very seriously examine, what and how great are the latent vices that could autho|rise us at once to level so specious a fabric with the ground. 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 excel|lencies heightened; its faults corrected; and its ca|pacities 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 incon|stancy and fluctuation natural to courts, an earnest endeavour towards the prosperity and improve|ment of the country; he must admit, that it had long been employed, in some instances, wholly to remove, in many considerably to correct, the abu|sive practices and usages that had prevailed in the state; and that even the unlimited power of the sovereign over the persons of his subjects, incon|sistent, as undoubtedly it was, with law and liber|ty, had yet been every day growing more miti|gated 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,
