It is a policy
that has very much the complexion of a fraud.
I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty
as well as any gentleman of that society, be he who he will; and
perhaps I have given as good proofs of my attachment to that cause
in the whole course of my public conduct. I think I envy liberty as
little as they do to any other nation. But I cannot stand forward
and give praise or blame to anything which relates to human actions,
and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands
stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of
metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen
pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its
distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances
are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious
to mankind. Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty,
is good; yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated
France on her enjoyment of a government (for she then had a
government) without inquiry what the nature of that government was, or
how it was administered? Can I now congratulate the same nation upon
its freedom? Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed
amongst the blessings of mankind, that I am seriously to felicitate
a madman, who has escaped from the protecting restraint and
wholesome darkness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of
light and liberty? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer
who has broke prison upon the recovery of his natural rights? This
would be to act over again the scene of the criminals condemned to the
galleys, and their heroic deliverer, the metaphysic Knight of the
Sorrowful Countenance.
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