Introduction
In 1793, Prime Minister William Pitt spoke about the French Revolution and the recent assassination of King Louis XVI. He reminded the country how fortunate Britain was to possess a Constitution designed to prevent the country lurching from one extreme politics to another.
WE owe our present happiness and prosperity, which has never been equalled in the annals of mankind, to a mixture of monarchical government. We feel and know we are happy under that form of government.*
We consider it as our first duty to maintain and reverence the British constitution, which, for wise and just reasons of lasting and internal policy, attaches inviolability to the sacred person of the Sovereign, though, at the same time, by the responsibility it has annexed to government, by the check of a wise system of laws, and by a mixture of aristocratic and democratical power in the frame of legislation, it has equally exempted itself from the danger arising from the exercise of absolute power on the one hand, and the still more dangerous contagion of popular licentiousness on the other.
The equity of our laws and the freedom of our political system have been the envy of every surrounding nation. It is the boast of the law of England, that it affords equal security and protection to the high and the low, to the rich and the poor.
Similar sentiments were later expressed by George Canning, when under cover of Parliamentary reform some were agitating for republicanism in England. See our post The Power of Balance.
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