[lemma=the] | [lemma=social] [lemma=□] □
[lemma=the] | [lemma=social] [lemma=change] □
[lemma=the] | [lemma=social] [lemma=social] □
But such a conviction is almost certain to beget , on the part of persons suffering under what they deem to be an unjust law , the belief , delusive though it often is , that any kind of injustice may under a democratic government be rightly opposed by the use of force . Nor can the argument used by Priestley ,10 and in effect by the protesting Peers that Septennial Parliaments were at first a direct usurpation of the rights of the people ; for by the same authority that one Parliament prolonged their own power to seven years , they might have continued it to twice seven , or like the Parliament of 1641 have made it perpetual be treated as a blunder grounded simply on the " ignorant assumption " that the Septennial Act prolonged the original duration of Parliament.ai The contention of Priestley and others was in substance that members elected to serve for three years were constitutionally so 8 Lord Mahon , History of England , i. p. 302 . In other words , the House of Commons often fails to be , as it is sometimes expressed , " the mirror of the national mind , " or to exactly reflect the will of the electors . The King and the Ministry were convinced ( and with reason ) that an appeal to the electors , many of whom were Jacobites , might be perilous not only to the Ministry but to the tranquillity of the state . The Roman Republic and the Roman Empire did not produce thinkers or writers who did as much for the progress of mankind as was done by the philosophers , the historians , and the poets of Greece , and the fruits of Greek genius were mainly due to the intellectual achievements of Athens during not much more than a century .