You would have rendered the cause of liberty
venerable in the eyes of every worthy mind in every nation. You
would have shamed despotism from the earth by showing that freedom was
not only reconcilable, but, as when well disciplined it is,
auxiliary to law. You would have had an unoppressive but a
productive revenue. You would have had a flourishing commerce to
feed it. You would have had a free constitution, a potent monarchy,
a disciplined army, a reformed and venerated clergy, a mitigated but
spirited nobility to lead your virtue, not to overlay it; you would
have had a liberal order of commons to emulate and to recruit that
nobility; you would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and
obedient people, taught to seek and to recognize the happiness that is
to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true
moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction which, by
inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to
travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate
and embitter that real inequality which it never can remove, and which
the order of civil life establishes as much for the benefit of those
whom it must leave in a humble state as those whom it is able to exalt
to a condition more splendid, but not more happy. You had a smooth and
easy career of felicity and glory laid open to you, beyond anything
recorded in the history of the world, but you have shown that
difficulty is good for man.
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