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 ¬off the crowd from a great house. — If they af- fect public freedom, the most efficacious laws should be made to prevent it; but let a monarchi- cal government, when made a free one by popu- lar balances, have all its ancient trappings. — To say they are useless, because they have no useful duties, may be a false conclusion. — A critic of this description might reason in the same manner with nature, and accuse her of the most senseless profusion for dressing out a cock pheasant or a peacock quite differently from a jackdaw or a crow. — How unmercifully those poor birds would be plucked! not a feather would be left in their sinecure tails. It is not, therefore, in the choice of the high men of my country to depart from those dignities which long custom has establish- ed, nor to relax in the visible distinctions which support them, because, since the laws would be degraded by the degradation of their authors, it would be a kind of treason against the state. ¬" England is much too enlightened to be ¬seduced by a false notion of equality into a ¬c 4 system ¬ /n