All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely
torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of
a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding
ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering
nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be
exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.
On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a
woman; a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest
order. All homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without
distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly. Regicide,
and parricide, and sacrilege are but fictions of superstition,
corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity. The murder of a
king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father are only common homicide;
and if the people are by any chance or in any way gainers by it, a
sort of homicide much the most pardonable, and into which we ought not
to make too severe a scrutiny.
On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring
of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid
wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be
supported only by their own terrors and by the concern which each
individual may find in them from his own private speculations or can
spare to them from his own private interests.
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