This method turns their understanding from the object before them, and
from the present exigencies of the world, to comparisons with former
times, of which, after all, we can know very little and very
imperfectly; and our guides, the historians, who are to give us their
true interpretation, are often prejudiced, often ignorant, often fonder
of system than of truth. Whereas, if a man with reasonable good parts
and natural sagacity, and not in the leading-strings of any master, will
look steadily on the business before him, without being diverted by
retrospect and comparison, he may be capable of forming a reasonable
good judgment of what is to be done. There are some fundamental points
in which Nature never changes; but they are few and obvious, and belong
rather to morals than to politics. But so far as regards political
matter, the human mind and human affairs are susceptible of infinite
modifications, and of combinations wholly new and unlooked-for. Very
few, for instance, could have imagined that property, which has been
taken for natural dominion, should, through the whole of a vast kingdom,
lose all its importance, and even its influence.
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