If, however, you could find out these pedigrees of guilt, I do not think
the difference would be essential. History records many things, which
ought to make us hate evil actions; but neither history, nor morals, nor
policy, can teach us to punish innocent men on that account. What lesson
does the iniquity of prevalent factions read to us? It ought to lesson
us into an abhorrence of the abuse of our own power in our own day; when
we hate its excesses so much in other persons and in other times. To
that school true statesmen ought to be satisfied to leave mankind. They
ought not to call from the dead all the discussions and litigations
which formerly inflamed the furious factions, which had torn their
country to pieces; they ought not to rake into the hideous and
abominable things, which were done in the turbulent fury of an injured,
robbed, and persecuted people, and which were afterwards cruelly
revenged in the execution, and as outrageously and shamefully
exaggerated in the representation, in order, a hundred and fifty
years after, to find some colour for justifying them in the eternal
proscription and civil excommunication of a whole people.