The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or obnoxious to mankind." This is at once the weapon with which he would have defended his own consistency, and attacked the absolute proceedings in France.

He changed his front, but he never changed his ground.

He was not more passionate against the proscription in France, than he had been against the suspension of Habeas Corpus in the American war.

"I flatter myself," he said in the _Reflections_, "that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty." Ten years before he had said, "The liberty, the only liberty I mean, is a liberty connected with order." The court tried to regulate liberty too severely.

It found in him an inflexible opponent.