Public prosecutions are become little better than schools for treason;
of no use but to improve the dexterity of criminals in the mystery of
evasion; or to show with what complete impunity men may conspire against
the commonwealth; with what safety assassins may attempt its awful head.
Everything is secure, except what the laws have made sacred; everything
is tameness and languor that is not fury and faction. Whilst the
distempers of a relaxed fibre prognosticate and prepare all the morbid
force of convulsion in the body of the state, the steadiness of the
physician is overpowered by the very aspect of the disease. The doctor
of the constitution, pretending to underrate what he is not able to
contend with, shrinks from his own operation. He doubts and questions
the salutary but critical terrors of the cautery and the knife. He takes
a poor credit even from his defeat, and covers impotence under the mask
of lenity. He praises the moderation of the laws, as, in his hands,
he sees them baffled and despised. Is all this, because in our day the
statutes of the kingdom are not engrossed in as firm a character, and
imprinted in as black and legible a type as ever? No! the law is a
clear, but it is a dead letter. Dead and putrid, it is insufficient to
save the state, but potent to infect and to kill. Living law, full of
reason, and of equity and justice (as it is, or it should not exist),
ought to be severe and awful too; or the words of menace, whether
written on the parchment roll of England, or cut into the brazen tablet
of Rome, will excite nothing but contempt. How comes it, that in all the
state prosecutions of magnitude, from the Revolution to within these
two or three years, the Crown has scarcely ever retired disgraced and
defeated from its courts? Whence this alarming change? By a connection
easily felt, and not impossible to be traced to its cause, all the parts
of the state have their correspondence and consent. They who bow to the
enemy abroad, will not be of power to subdue the conspirator at home. It
is impossible not to observe, that, in proportion as we approximate to
the poisonous jaws of anarchy, the fascination grows irresistible.
In proportion as we are attracted towards the focus of illegality,
irreligion, and desperate enterprise, all the venomous and blighting
insects of the state are awakened into life. The promise of the year is
blasted, and shrivelled and burned up before them. Our most salutary and
most beautiful institutions yield nothing but dust and smut; the
harvest of our law is no more than stubble. It is in the nature of these
eruptive diseases in the state to sink in by fits, and re-appear. But
the fuel of the malady remains; and in my opinion is not in the smallest
degree mitigated in its malignity, though it waits the favourable moment
of a freer communication with the source of regicide to exert and to
increase its force.
Is it that the people are changed, that the commonwealth cannot be
protected by its laws? I hardly think it. On the contrary, I conceive
that these things happen because men are not changed, but remain always
what they always were; they remain what the bulk of us ever must be,
when abandoned to our vulgar propensities, without guide, leader, or
control; that is, made to be full of a blind elevation in prosperity; to
despise untried dangers; to be overpowered with unexpected reverses;
to find no clue in a labyrinth of difficulties, to get out of a present
inconvenience with any risk of future ruin; to follow and to bow to
fortune; to admire successful though wicked enterprise, and to imitate
what we admire; to contemn the government which announces danger from
sacrilege and regicide, whilst they are only in their infancy and their
struggle, but which finds nothing that can alarm in their adult state,
and in the power and triumph of those destructive principles. In a
mass we cannot be left to ourselves. We must have leaders. If none will
undertake to lead us right, we shall find guides who will contrive to
conduct us to shame and ruin.