The crown has considered me after long service; the crown has paid the
duke of Bedford by advance. He has had a long credit for any service
which he may perform hereafter. He is secure, and long may he be secure,
in his advance, whether he performs any services or not. But let him
take care how he endangers the safety of that constitution which secures
his own utility or his own insignificance; or how he discourages those
who take up even puny arms to defend an order of things which, like the
sun of heaven, shines alike on the useful and the worthless. His grants
are engrafted on the public law of Europe, covered with the awful
hoar of innumerable ages. They are guarded by the sacred rules of
prescription, found in that full treasury of jurisprudence from which
the jejuneness and penury of our municipal law has, by degrees, been
enriched and strengthened. This prescription I had my share (a very full
share) in bringing to its perfection. The duke of Bedford will stand as
long as prescriptive law endures; as long as the great stable laws of
property, common to us with all civilized nations, are kept in their
integrity, and without the smallest intermixture of laws, maxims,
principles, or precedents, of the grand revolution. They are secure
against all changes but one. The whole revolutionary system, institutes,
digest, code, novels, text, gloss, comment, are not only not the same,
but they are the very reverse, and the reverse fundamentally, of all
the laws, on which civil life has hitherto been upheld in all the
governments of the world. The learned professors of the rights of man
regard prescription not as a title to bar all claim, set up against all
possession, but they look on prescription as itself a bar against the
possessor and proprietor. They hold an immemorial possession to be no
more than a long-continued, and therefore an aggravated injustice.
Such are THEIR ideas, such THEIR religion, and such THEIR law. But as to
OUR country and OUR race, as long as the well-compacted structure of our
church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient
law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a
temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion; as long
as the British monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of
the state, shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty
of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval
towers,--as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the
subjected land--so long the mounds and dykes of the low, fat Bedford
Level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the
levellers of France. As long as our sovereign lord the king, and his
faithful subjects, the lords and commons of this realm,--the triple
cord, which no man can break; the solemn, sworn, constitutional
frank-pledge of this nation; the firm guarantees of each other's being,
and each other's rights; the joint and several securities, each in its
place and order, for every kind and every quality, of property and of
dignity:--as long as these endure, so long the duke of Bedford is safe:
and we are all safe together--the high from the blights of envy and the
spoliations of rapacity; the low from the iron hand of oppression and
the insolent spurn of contempt. Amen! and so be it: and so it will be,--
"Dum domus Aeneae Capitoli immobile saxum
Accolet; imperiumque pater Romanus habebit."