To which I answer,
First, No more than any other hypothesis: for when the
people are made miserable, and find themselves exposed to the ill
usage of arbitrary power, cry up their governors, as much as you
will, for sons of Jupiter; let them be sacred and divine,
descended, or authorized from heaven; give them out for whom or
what you please, the same will happen. 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.
Sec. 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 born 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 rouze 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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