This way of PROSCRIBING THE CITIZENS BY DENOMINATIONS AND GENERAL
DESCRIPTIONS, dignified by the name of reason of state, and security for
constitutions and commonwealths, is nothing better at bottom, than the
miserable invention of an ungenerous ambition, which would fain hold the
sacred trust of power, without any of the virtues or any of the energies
that give a title to it: a receipt of policy, made up of a detestable
compound of malice, cowardice, and sloth. They would govern men against
their will; but in that government they would be discharged from the
exercise of vigilance, providence, and fortitude; and therefore, that
they may sleep on their watch, they consent to take some one division
of the society into partnership of the tyranny over the rest. But let
government, in what form it may be, comprehend the whole in its justice,
and restrain the suspicious by its vigilance; let it keep watch and
ward; let it discover by its sagacity, and punish by its firmness, all
delinquency against its power, whenever delinquency exists in the overt
acts; and then it will be as safe as ever God and nature intended it
should be. Crimes are the acts of individuals, and not of denominations;
and therefore arbitrarily to class men under general descriptions,
in order to proscribe and punish them in the lump for a presumed
delinquency, of which perhaps but a part, perhaps none at all, are
guilty, is indeed a compendious method, and saves a world of trouble
about proof; but such a method, instead of being law, is an act of
unnatural rebellion against the legal dominion of reason and justice;
and this vice, in any constitution that entertains it, at one time or
other will certainly bring on its ruin.