I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty as well as any gentleman of
that society, be he who he will: and perhaps I have given as good proofs
of my attachment to that cause in the whole course of my public conduct.
I think I envy liberty as little as they do, to any other nation. But I
cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to anything which relates
to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object, as
it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude
of metaphysical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen
pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its
distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The circumstances are
what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to
mankind. Abstractedly speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good;
yet could I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France on
her enjoyment of a government (for she then had a government)
without inquiry what the nature of that government was, or how it was
administered? Can I now congratulate the same nation upon its freedom?
Is it because liberty in the abstract may be classed amongst the
blessings of mankind that I am seriously to felicitate a madman, who
has escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his
cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? Am I to
congratulate a highwayman and murderer, who has broken prison, upon
the recovery of his natural rights? This would be to act over again
the scene of the criminals condemned to the galleys, and their heroic
deliverer, the metaphysic knight of the sorrowful countenance. When I
see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work;
and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild GAS,
the fixed air, is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our
judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the
liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation
of a troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before I
venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have
really received one. Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver;
and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings.
I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of
France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government;
with public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies; with the
collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue; with morality
and religion; with solidity and property; with peace and order; with
civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things too;
and, without them, liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not
likely to continue long. The effect of liberty to individuals, is, that
they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them
to do before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into
complaints. Prudence would dictate this in the case of separate,
insulated, private men; but liberty, when men act in bodies, is POWER.
Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the
use which is made of POWER; and particularly of so trying a thing as NEW
power in NEW persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions,
they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who
appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real
movers.