is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but, in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state, in what we improve, we are never wholly new; in what we retain, we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this manner, and on those principles, to our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the Constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars. Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts, to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several other, and those no small benefits, from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of habitual, native dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction. By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its gallery of portraits, its monumental inscriptions, its records, evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our civil institutions, on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men; on account of their age, and on account of those from whom they are descended. All your sophisters can not produce any thing better adapted to preserve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than cur speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and privileges. DEGRADING INFLUENCE OF LOW VIEWS IN POLITICS. have been conducted by persons, who, while they attempted or effected changes in the commonwealth, sanctified their ambition by advancing the dignity of the people whose peace they troubled. They had long views. They aimed at the rule, not at the destruction of their country. They were men of great civil and great military talents, and if the terror, the ornament of their age. They were not like Jew brokers contending with each other who could best remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils. The compliment made to one of the great bad men of the old stamp (Cromwell) by his kinsman, a favorite poet of that time, shows what it was he proposed, and what, indeed, to a great degree, he accomplished in the success of his ambition. "Still as you rise, the state exalted too, Finds no distemper while 'tis changed by you; Changed like the world's great scene, when, without noise, The rising sun night's vulgar lights destroys." These disturbers were not so much like men usurping power, as asserting their natural place in society. Their rising was to illuminate and beautify the world. Their conquest over their competitors was by outshining them. The hand that, like a destroying angel, smote the country, communicated to it the force and energy under which it suffered. I do not say (God forbid) I do not say that the virtues of such men were to be taken as a balance to their crimes, but they were some corrective to their effects. Such was, as I said, our Cromwell. Such were your whole race of Guises, Condés, and Colignis. Such the Richelieus, who in more quiet times acted in the spirit of a civil war. Such, as better men, and in a less dubious cause, were your Henry the Fourth and your Sully, though nursed in civil confusions, and not wholly without some of their taint. It is a thing to be wondered at to see how very soon France, when she had a moment to respire, recovered and emerged from the longest and most dreadful civil war that ever was known in any nation. Why? because, among all their massacres, they had not slain the mind in their country. A conscious dignity, a noble pride, a generous sense of glory and emulation, was not extinguished. On the contrary, it was kindled and inflamed. The organs, also, of the state, however shattered, exist. ed. All the prizes of honor and virtue, all the rewards, all the distinctions remained. But your present confusion, like a palsy, has attacked the fountain of life itself. Every person in your ciple of honor, is disgraced and degraded, and can entertain no sensation of life except in a mortified and humiliated indignation. When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dig-country, in a situation to be actuated by a prinnity to an ambition without a distinct object, and work with low instruments and for low ends, the whole composition becomes low and base. Does not something like this now appear in France? Does it not produce something ignoble and inglorious? a kind of meanness in all the prevalent policy? a tendency in all that is done to lower, along with individuals, all the dignity and importance of the state? Other revolutions A A TRUE THEORY OF THE RIGHTS OF MAN. Far am I from denying in theory; full as far is my heart from withholding in practice (if I were of power to give or to withhold) the rea. rights of men. | In denying their false claims of practical defect. By having a right to every right, I do not mean to injure those which are thing they want every thing. Government is a real, and are such as their pretended rights contrivance of human wisdom to provide for huwould totally destroy. If civil society be made man wants. Men have a right that these wants for the advantage of man, all the advantages for should be provided for by this wisdom. Among which it is made become his right. It is an in- these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of stitution of beneficence; and law itself is only civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their beneficence acting by a rule. Men have a right passions. Society requires not only that the to live by that rule; they have a right to do jus- passions of individuals should be subjected, but tice, as between their fellows, whether their fel- that even in the mass and body, as well as in lows are in politic function or in ordinary oc- the individuals, the inclinations of men should cupation. They have a right to the fruits of frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their industry, and to the means of making their their passions brought into subjection. This industry fruitful. They have a right to the ac- can only be done by a power out of themselves, quisitions of their parents; to the nourishment and not, in the exercise of its function, subject and improvement of their offspring; to instruc- to that will and to those passions which it is its tion in life, and to consolation in death. What- office to bridle and subdue. In this sense, the ever each man can separately do, without tres-restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are passing upon others, he has a right to do for to be reckoned among their rights; but as the himself; and he has a right to a fair portion liberties and the restrictions vary with times and of all which society, with all its combinations of circumstances, and admit of infinite modificaskill and force, can do in his favor. In this part-tions, they can not be settled upon any abstract nership all men have equal rights, but not to rule, and nothing is so foolish as to discuss them equal things. He that has but five shillings in upon that principle. the partnership has as good a right to it as he that has five hundred pounds has to his larger proportion; but he has not a right to an equal dividend in the product of the joint stock; and as to the share of power, authority, and direction which each individual ought to have in the management of the state, that I must deny to be among the direct, original rights of man in civil society; for I have in my contemplation the civil, social man, and no other. It is a thing to be settled by convention. If civil society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be its law. That convention must limit and modify all the descriptions of constitution which are formed under it. Every sort of legislative, judicial, or executory power, are its creatures. They can have no being in any other state of things; and how can any man claim, under the conventions of civil society, rights which do not so much as suppose its existence? rights which are absolutely repugnant to it? One of the first motives to civil society, and which becomes one of its fundamental rules, is, that no man should be judge in his own cause. By this each person has at once divested himself of the first fundamental right of uncovenanted man; that is, to judge for himself, and to assert his own cause. He abdicates all right to be his own governor. He inclusively, in a great measure, abandons the right of selfdefense, the first law of nature. Men can not enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together. That he may obtain justice, he gives up his right of determining what it is in points the most essential to him. That he may secure some liberty, he makes a surrender in trust of the whole of it. Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in total independence of it, and exist in much greater clearness, and in a much greater degree of abstract perfection; but their abstract perfection is their The moment you abate any thing from the full rights of men each to govern himself, and suffer any artificial, positive limitation upon those rights, from that moment the whole organization of government becomes a consideration of convenience. This it is which makes the Constitution of a state, and the due distribution of its powers, a matter of the most delicate and complicated skill. It requires a deep knowledge of human nature and human necessities, and of the things which facilitate or obstruct the various ends which are to be pursued by the mechanism of civil institutions. The state is to have recruits to its strength, and remedies to its distempers. What is the use of discussing a man's abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician rather than the professor of metaphysics. The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught à priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science, because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate, but that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation, and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning. The reverse also happens; and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions. In states there are often some obscure and almost latent causes, things which appear at first view of little moment, on which a very great part of its prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend. The science of government being, therefore. so practical in itself, and intended for such practical purposes-a matter which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be—it is with infinite caution | have consecrated the state, that no man should that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree, for ages, the common purposes of society, or on building it up again, without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes. TRUE STATESMANSHIP. approach to look into its defects or corruptions but with due caution; that he should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion; that he should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By this wise prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces, and put him into the kettle of magicians, in hopes that, by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations, they may regenerate the paternal constitution, and renovate their father's life. Society is, indeed, a contract. Subordinate contracts for objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at pleasure; but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence, because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership can not be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which The true lawgiver ought to have a heart full of sensibility. He ought to love and respect his kind, and to fear himself. It may be allowed to his temperament to catch his ultimate object with an intuitive glance, but his movements toward it ought to be deliberate. Political arrangement, as it is a work for social ends, is to be only wrought by social means. There mind must conspire with mind. Time is required to produce that union of minds which alone can produce all the good we aim at. Our patience will achieve more than our force. If I might venture to appeal to what is so much out of fashion in Paris, I mean to experience, I should tell you that in my course I have known, and, according to my measure, have co-operated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business. By a slow but well-sustained progress the effect of each step is watched; the good or ill success of the first gives light to us in the second; and so, from light to light, we are conducted with safety through the whole series. We see that the parts of the system do not clash. The evils latent in the most promising contrivances are provided for as they arise. One advantage is as little as possible sacrificed to anoth-holds all physical and all moral natures each in We compensate, we reconcile, we balance. We are enabled to unite into a consistent whole the various anomalies and contending principles that are found in the minds and affairs of men. From hence arises not an excellence in simplic-porations of that universal kingdom are not mority, but one far superior, an excellence in composition. Where the great interests of mankind are concerned through a long succession of generations, that succession ought to be admitted into some share in the councils which are so deeply to affect them. If justice requires this, the work itself requires the aid of more minds than one age can furnish. It is from this view of things that the best legislators have been often satisfied with the establishment of some sure, solid, and ruling principle in government; a power like that which some of the philosophers have called a plastic nature; and having fixed the principle, they have left it afterward to its own operation. er. THE STATE CONSECRATED IN THE HEARTS OF To avoid, therefore, the evils of inconstancy and versatility, ten thousand times worse than those of obstinacy and the blindest prejudice, we their appointed place. This law is not subject to the will of those who, by an obligation above them, and infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will to that law. The municipal cor ally at liberty at their pleasure, and on their speculations of a contingent improvement, wholly to separate and tear asunder the bands of their subordinate community, and to dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, unconnected chaos of elementary principles. It is the first and supreme necessity only, a necessity that is not chosen, but chooses; a necessity paramount to deliberation, that admits no discussion and demands no evidence, which alone can justify a resort to anarchy. This necessity is no exception to the rule, because this necessity itself is a part, too, of that moral and physical disposition of things to which man must be obedient by consent of force; but if that which is only submission to necessity should be made the object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed, and the rebellious are outlawed, cast forth, and exiled from this world of reason, and order, and peace, and vir tue, and fruitful penitence, into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow. These, my dear sir, are, were, and I think long | fies his condition. It is for the man in humble will be, the sentiments of not the least learned life, and to raise his nature, and to put him in and reflecting part of this kingdom. They who mind of a state in which the privileges of opuare included in this description form their opin-lence will cease, when he will be equal by naions on such grounds as such persons ought to ture, and may be more than equal by virtue, form them. The less inquiring receive them that this portion of the general wealth of his from an authority which those whom Providence country is employed and sanctified. dooms to live on trust need not be ashamed to The English people are also satisfied that to rely on. These two sorts of men move in the the great the consolations of religion are as necsame direction, though in a different place.essary as its instructions. They, too, are among They both move with the order of the universe. the unhappy. They feel personal pain and doThey all know or feel this great ancient truth: mestic sorrow. In these they have no privi"Quod illi principi et præpotenti Deo qui om-lege, but are subject to pay their full contingent nem hunc mundum regit, nihil eorum quæ qui- to the contributions levied on mortality. They dem fiant in terris acceptius quam concilia et want this sovereign balm under their gnawing cætus hominum jure sociati quæ civitates appel- cares and anxieties, which, being less conversant lantur."6 They take this tenet of the head and about the limited wants of animal life, range withheart not from the great name which it imme-out limit, and are diversified by infinite combinadiately bears, nor from the greater from whence tions in the wild and unbounded regions of imit is derived, but from that which alone can give agination. Some charitable dole is wanting to true weight and sanction to any learned opinion, these, our often very unhappy brethren, to fill the the common nature and common relation of men. gloomy void that reigns in minds which have Persuaded that all things ought to be done with nothing on earth to hope or fear; something to reference, and referring all to the point of refer- relieve in the killing languor and over-labored ence to which all should be directed, they think lassitude of those who have nothing to do; themselves bound, not only as individuals, in the something to excite an appetite to existence in sanctuary of the heart, or as congregated in that the palled satiety which attends on all pleasures personal capacity, to renew the memory of their which may be bought, where nature is not left high origin and cast, but also in their corporate to her own process, where even desire is anticicharacter, to perform their national homage to pated, and even fruition defeated by meditated the Institutor, and Author and Protector of civil schemes and contrivances of delight, and no insociety; without which civil society man could terval, no obstacle is interposed between the not by any possibility arrive at the perfection of wish and the accomplishment. which his nature is capable, nor even make a remote and faint approach to it. They conceive that He who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue, willed also the necessary means of its perfection. He willed, therefore, the state. He willed its connection with the source and original archetype of all perfection. They who are convinced of this His will, which is the law of laws, and the sovereign of sovereigns, can not think it reprehensible that this our corporate fealty and homage, that this our recognition of a seigniory paramount, I had almost said this oblation of the state itself, as a worthy offering on the high altar of universal praise, should be performed as all public solemn acts are performed, in buildings, in music, in decorations, in speech, in the dignity of persons, according to the customs of mankind, taught by their nature! that is, with modest splendor, with unassuming state, with mild majesty, and sober pomp. For those purposes they think some part of the wealth of the country is as usefully employed as it can be in fomenting the luxury of individuals. It is the public ornament. It is the public consolation. It nourishes the public hope. The poorest man finds his own importance and dignity in it, while the wealth and pride of individuals at every moment makes the man of humble rank and fortune sensible of his inferiority, and degrades and viliThat nothing is more acceptable to the All-pow-commerce, to extinguish a manufacture, to deerful Being who rules the world than those councils of men under the authority of law, which bear the name of states.-Somnium Scipionis, sect. iii. THE REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENT OF FRANCE. Out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed specter, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of man. Going straightforward to its end, unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising all common maxims and all common means, that hideous phantom overpowered those who could not believe it was possible she could at all exist. * * The republic of regicide, with an annihilated revenue, with defaced manufactures, with a ruined commerce, with an uncultivated and halfdepopulated country, with a discontented, distressed, enslaved, and famished people, passing with a rapid, eccentric, incalculable course, from the wildest anarchy to the sternest despotism, has actually conquered the finest parts of Europe, has distressed, disunited, deranged, and broke to pieces all the rest. What now stands as government in France is struck at a heat. The design is wicked, immoral, impious, oppressive, but it is spirited and daring; it is systematic; it is simple in its principle; it has unity and consistency in perfection. In that country, entirely to cut off a branch of stroy the circulation of money, to violate credit, to suspend the course of agriculture, even to burn a city or to lay waste a province of their own, does not cost them a moment's anxiety. | To them, the will, the wish, the want, the liberty, the toil, the blood of individuals is as nothing. Individuality is left out of their scheme of government. The state is all in all. Every thing is referred to the production of force; afterward, every thing is trusted to the use of it. It is military in its principle, in its maxims, in its spirit, and in all its movements. The state has dominion and conquest for its sole objects; dominion over minds by proselytism, over bodies by arms. seen it; and if the world will shut their eyes to this state of things they will feel it more. The rulers there have found their resources in crimes. The discovery is dreadful; the mine exhaustless. They have every thing to gain, and they have nothing to lose. They have a boundless inheritance in hope; and there is no medium for them between the highest elevation and death with infamy. THEIR TREATMENT OF EMBASSADORS FROM FOR- To those who do not love to contemplate the fall of human greatness, I do not know a more mortifying spectacle than to see the assembled majesty of the crowned heads of Europe waiting as patient suitors in the ante-chamber of regi cide. They wait, it seems, until the sanguinary tyrant Carnot shall have snorted away the fumes of the indigested blood of his sovereign. Then, when sunk on the down of usurped pomp, he shall have sufficiently indulged his meditation with what monarch he shall next glut his ravening maw, he may condescend to signify that it is his pleasure to be awake; and that he is at leisure to receive the proposals of his high and mighty clients for the terms on which he may respite the execution of the sentence he has passed upon them. At the opening of those doors, what a sight it must be to behold the plenipotentiaries of royal impotence, in the precedency which they will intrigue to obtain, and which will be granted to them according to the seniority of their degradation, sneaking into the regicide presence, and with the relics of the smile, which they had dressed up for the levee of their mas Thus constituted, with an immense body of natural means, which are lessened in their amount only to be increased in their effect, France has, since the accomplishment of the revolution, a complete unity in its direction. It has destroyed every resource of the state which depends upon opinion and the good will of individuals. The riches of convention disappear. The advantages of nature in some measure remain; even these, I admit, are astonishingly lessened; the command over what remains is complete and absolute. They have found the short cut to the productions of nature, while others in pursuit of them are obliged to wind through the labyrinth of a very intricate state of society. They seize upon the fruit of the labor; they seize upon the laborer himself. Were France but half of what it is in population, in compactness, in applicability of its force, situated as it is, and being what it is, it would be too strong for most of the states of Europe, constituted as they are, and proceeding as they proceed. Would it be wise to estimate what the world of Europe, as well as the world of Asia, had to dread from Genghis Khân, upon a contemplation of the resources of the cold and barren spot in the remot-ters, still flickering on their curled lips, presentest Tartary from whence first issued that scourge of the human race? Ought we to judge from the excise and stamp duties of the rocks, or from the paper circulation of the sands of Arabia, the power by which Mohammed and his tribes laid hold at once on the two most powerful empires of the world, beat one of them totally to the ground, broke to pieces the other, and, in not much longer space of time than I have lived, overturned governments, laws, manners, religion, and extended an empire from the Indus to the Pyrenees? Material resources never have supplied, nor ever can supply the want of unity in design and constancy in pursuit; but unity in design, and perseverance and boldness in pursuit, have never wanted resources, and never will. We have not considered as we ought the dreadful energy of a state in which the property has nothing to do with the government. Reflect, again and again, on a government in which the property is in complete subjection, and where nothing rules but the mind of desperate men. The condition of a commonwealth not governed by its property was a combination of things which the learned and ingenious speculator Harrington, who has tossed about society into all forms, never could imagine to be possible. We have ing the faded remains of their courtly graces to meet the scornful, ferocious, sardonic grin of a bloody ruffian, who, while he is receiving their homage, is measuring them with his eye, and fitting to their size the slider of his guillotine! ILLUSTRATION FROM A CASE SUPPOSED IN EN GLAND. To illustrate my opinions on this subject, let us suppose a case, which, after what has happened, we can not think absolutely impossible, though the augury is to be abominated, and the event deprecated with our most ardent prayers. Let us suppose, then, that our gracious Sovereign was sacrilegiously murdered; his exemplary Queen, at the head of the matronage of this land, murdered in the same manner; that those princesses, whose beauty and modest elegance are the ornaments of the country, and who are the leaders and patterns of the ingenuous youth of their sex, were put to a cruel and ignominious death, with hundreds of others, mothers and daughters, ladies of the first distinction; that the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, princes the hope and pride of the nation, with all their brethren, were forced to fly from the knives of assassins-that the whole body of our excel |