1823. Feb. 28.

Greece. J.B. Observations on particular Articles

It will suffice of itself to prove the impossibility, that in the English form of government the power exercised by the King, or the power exercised by the House of Lords should ever have had for the end of its creation the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or so much as the happiness of any individual other than the several sorts of person, by whom those powers have been and are exercised, and their several connections. It will rid the country of both these sources of misrule and misery, so soon as the eyes of the greatest number are sufficiently open to the only sound principles of the art and science of government; that is to say if the supreme constitutive power be lodged in the hands of all who are capable of bearing a part in the exercise of it, instead of being engrossed by a minute fraction of that number almost all of them listed in the service of misrule by a community of corrupt and sinister interest.

It will render similar service to France, in the eyes of all Frenchmen who can endure to listen at it.

It will rid the Spanish constitution of its King: and of that vast reservoir and fountain of the matter of corruption the Council of State with its forty members, all of them creatures of the Monarch.

It will render similar service to Portugal.

It will render service even to the Constitution of the Anglo-American United States, matchless as it is as yet, and little short of the summit of absolute perfection as it is. It will clear it of its Senate: a mass of useless, and thence worse than useless complication introduced by a natural and not illaudable timidity, at a time when principles were as yet unsettled, and no sufficient stock of experience as yet obtained: established in imitation of that parent government, which, not without reason was universally regarded as the best, or to speak more properly the least bad government that, till the Anglo-American Government had had time to manifest itself, had ever been exemplified.