Vindication of the English constitution Author:Benjamin Disraeli Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: or the misrepresentations of factious writers exposed and stigmatized, the English constitution was universally recognised as an august and admirable fabric, and... more » counted among the choicest inventions of public intellect on record. That a very different tone has of late years been assumed by our public writers is a notorious circumstance. A political sect has sprung up avowedly adverse to the Estates of the realm, and seeking by means which, of course, it holds legal, the abrogation of a majority of them. These anti-constitutional writers, like all new votaries, are remarkable for their zeal and their activity. They omit no means of disseminating their creed : they are very active missionaries: there is no medium of the public press of which they do not avail themselves: they have their newspapers, daily and weekly, their magazines, and their reviews. The unstamped press takes the cue from them, and the members of the party who are in Parliament lose no opportunity of dilating on the congenial theme at the public meetings of their constituents. The avowed object of this new sect of states- chapter{Section 4men is to submit the institutions of the country to the test of Utility, and to form a new constitution on the abstract principles of theoretic science. I think it is Voltaire who tells us, that there is nothing more common than to read and to converse to no purpose, and that in history, in morals, and in divinity we should beware of Equivocal Terms. I do not think that politics should form an exception to this salutary rule; and, for my own part, it appears to me that this term, Utility, is about as equivocal as any one which, from the time of the Nominalists and Realists, to our present equally controversial and equally indefinite days, hath been let loose to breed sects ...« less