Whilst they are
possessed by these notions, it is vain to talk to them of the practice
of their ancestors, the fundamental laws of their country, the fixed
form of a constitution whose merits are confirmed by the solid test of
long experience and an increasing public strength and national
prosperity. They despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men;
and as for the rest, they have wrought underground a mine that will
blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity, all
precedents, charters, and acts of parliament. They have "the rights of
men". Against these there can be no prescription, against these no
agreement is binding; these admit no temperament and no compromise;
anything withheld from their full demand is so much of fraud and
injustice. Against these their rights of men let no government look
for security in the length of its continuance, or in the justice and
lenity of its administration. The objections of these speculatists, if
its forms do not quadrate with their theories, are as valid against
such an old and beneficent government as against the most violent
tyranny or the greenest usurpation. They are always at issue with
governments, not on a question of abuse, but a question of
competency and a question of title. I have nothing to say to the
clumsy subtilty of their political metaphysics. Let them be their
amusement in the schools.
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