[The following extract from a speech on Parliamentary Reform
affords an excellent example of his style of eloquence.]
Other nations, excited by the example of the liberty which this
country has long possessed, have attempted to copy our
Constitution; and some of them have shot beyond it in the
fierceness of their pursuit. I grudge not to other nations that
share of liberty which they may acquire; in the name of God, let
them enjoy it! But let us warn them that they lose not the object
of their desire by the very eagerness with which they attempt to
grasp it. Inheritors and conservators of national freedom, let
us, while others are seeking it in restlessness and trouble, be a
steady and shining light to guide their course; not a wandering
meteor to bewilder and mislead them.
Let it not be thought that this is an unfriendly or disheartening
counsel to those who are either struggling under the pressure of
harsh government, or exulting in the novelty of sudden
emancipation. It is addressed much rather to those who, though
cradled and educated amidst the sober blessings of the British
Constitution, pant for other schemes of liberty than those which
that Constitution sanctions, other than are compatible with a
just equality of civil rights, or with the necessary restraints
of social obligations; of some of whom it may be said, in the
language which Dryden puts into the mouth of one of the most
extravagant of his heroes, that
"They would be free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in the woods the noble savage ran."
Noble and swelling sentiments! but such as cannot be reduced into
practice. Grand ideas! but which must be qualified and adjusted
by a compromise between the aspirings of individuals, and a due
concern for the general tranquility; must be subdued and
chastened by reason and experience before they can be directed to
any useful end! A search after abstract perfection in government
may produce in generous minds an enterprise and enthusiasm to be
recorded by the historian and to be celebrated by the poet; but
such perfection is not an object of reasonable pursuit, because
it is not one of possible attainment; and never yet did a
passionate struggle after an absolutely unattainable object fail
to be productive of misery to an individual, of madness and
confusion to a people. As the inhabitants of those burning
climates which lie beneath a tropical sun sigh for the coolness
of the mountain and the grove, so (all history instructs us) do
nations which have basked for a time in the torrid blaze of
unmitigated liberty too often call upon the shades of despotism,
even of military despotism, to cover them--a protection which
blights while it shelters; which dwarfs the intellect and stunts
the energies of man, but to which a wearied nation willingly
resorts from intolerable heats and from perpetual danger of
convulsion.
Our lot is happily cast in the temperate zone of freedom, the
clime best suited to the development of the moral qualities of
the human race, to the cultivation of their faculties, and to the
security as well as the improvement of their virtues; a clime,
not exempt, indeed, from variations of the elements, but
variations which purify while they agitate the atmosphere that we
breathe. Let us be sensible of the advantages which it is our
happiness to enjoy. Let us guard with pious gratitude the flame
of genuine liberty, that fire from heaven, of which our
Constitution is the holy depository; and let us not, for the
chance of rendering it more intense and more radiant, impair its
purity or hazard its extinction.