The people generally ill treated, and contrary to
right, will be ready upon any occasion to ease themselves of a
burden that sits heavy upon them. They will wish and seek for the
opportunity, which in the change, weakness, and accidents of human
affairs, seldom delays long to offer itself He must have lived but a
little while in the world, who has not seen examples of this in his
time; and he must have read very little who cannot produce examples of
it in all sorts of governments in the world.
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.
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