He believes he might have had such a situation; but again he cheerfully
took his fate with the party.
It would be a serious imputation upon the prudence of my friend, to have
made even such trivial sacrifices as it was in his power to make for
principles which he did not truly embrace or did not perfectly
understand. In either case the folly would have been great. The question
now is, whether, when he first practically professed Whig principles, he
understood what principles he professed, and whether in his book he has
faithfully expressed them.
When he entered into the Whig party, he did not conceive that they
pretended to any discoveries. They did not affect to be better Whigs
than those were who lived in the days in which principle was put to the
test. Some of the Whigs of those days were then living. They were what
the Whigs had been at the Revolution,--what they had been during the
reign of Queen Anne,--what they had been at the accession of the present
royal family.
What they were at those periods is to be seen. It rarely happens to a
party to have the opportunity of a clear, authentic, recorded
declaration of their political tenets upon the subject of a great
constitutional event like that of the Revolution.
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