As it is the
most shameless, it is also the most fearless. No man apprehends in his
person that he can be made subject to punishment. Certainly the people
at large never ought, for as all punishments are for example toward
the conservation of the people at large, the people at large can never
become the subject of punishment by any human hand.* It is therefore
of infinite importance that they should not be suffered to imagine
that their will, any more than that of kings, is the standard of right
and wrong. They ought to be persuaded that they are full as little
entitled, and far less qualified with safety to themselves, to use any
arbitrary power whatsoever; that therefore they are not, under a false
show of liberty, but in truth to exercise an unnatural, inverted
domination, tyrannically to exact from those who officiate in the
state not an entire devotion to their interest, which is their
right, but an abject submission to their occasional will,
extinguishing thereby in all those who serve them all moral principle,
all sense of dignity, all use of judgment, and all consistency of
character; whilst by the very same process they give themselves up a
proper, a suitable, but a most contemptible prey to the servile
ambition of popular sycophants or courtly flatterers.
* Quicquid multis peccatur inultum.
When the people have emptied themselves of all the lust of selfish
will, which without religion it is utterly impossible they ever
should, when they are conscious that they exercise, and exercise
perhaps in a higher link of the order of delegation, the power,
which to be legitimate must be according to that eternal, immutable
law in which will and reason are the same, they will be more careful
how they place power in base and incapable hands.
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