§. 225. Secondly: I answer, such revolutions happen not upon every little
mismanagement in public affairs. Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong
and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty will be borne by the
people without mutiny or murmur. But if a long train of abuses, prevarications,
and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people,
and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going,
it is not to be wondered that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavour
to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which
government was at first erected, and without which, ancient names and specious
forms are so far from being better, that they are much worse than the state of
Nature or pure anarchy; the inconveniencies being all as great and as near, but
the remedy farther off and more difficult.
