Political reason is a computing principle: adding, subtracting,
multiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically or
mathematically, true moral denominations.
By these theorists the right of the people is almost always
sophistically confounded with their power. The body of the
community, whenever it can come to act, can meet with no effectual
resistance; but till power and right are the same, the whole body of
them has no right inconsistent with virtue, and the first of all
virtues, prudence. Men have no right to what is not reasonable and
to what is not for their benefit; for though a pleasant writer said,
liceat perire poetis, when one of them, in cold blood, is said to have
leaped into the flames of a volcanic revolution, ardentem frigidus
Aetnam insiluit, I consider such a frolic rather as an unjustifiable
poetic license than as one of the franchises of Parnassus; and whether
he was a poet, or divine, or politician that chose to exercise this
kind of right, I think that more wise, because more charitable,
thoughts would urge me rather to save the man than to preserve his
brazen slippers as the monuments of his folly.
The kind of anniversary sermons to which a great part of what I
write refers, if men are not shamed out of their present course in
commemorating the fact, will cheat many out of the principles, and
deprive them of the benefits, of the revolution they commemorate.
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