It is no wonder, therefore, that, with these ideas of everything in their Constitution and government at home, either in Church or State, as illegitimate and usurped, or at best as a vain mockery, they look abroad with an eager and passionate enthusiasm.  Whilst they are possessed by these notions, it is vain to talk to them of the practice of their ancestors, the fundamental laws of their country, the fixed form of a Constitution whose merits are confirmed by the solid test of long experience and an increasing public strength and national prosperity.  They despise experience as the wisdom of unlettered men; and as for the rest, they have wrought under ground a mine that will blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts of Parliament.  They have “the rights of men.”  Against these there can be no prescription; against these no argument is binding:  these admit no temperament and no compromise:  anything withheld from their full demand is so much of fraud and injustice.  Against these their rights of men let no government look for security in the length of its continuance, or in the justice and lenity of its administration.  The objections of these speculatists, if its forms do not quadrate with their theories, are as valid against such an old and beneficent government as against the most violent tyranny or the greenest usurpation.  They are always at issue with governments, not on a question of abuse, but a question of competency and a question of title.  I have nothing to say to the clumsy subtilty of their political metaphysics.  Let them be their amusement in the schools.

        Illa se jactet in aula
    AEolus, et clauso ventorum carcere regnet.

But let them not break prison to burst like a Levanter, to sweep the earth with their hurricane, and to break up the fountains of the great deep to overwhelm us!

Far am I from denying in theory, full as far is my heart from withholding in practice, (if I were of power to give or to withhold,) the real rights of men.  In denying their false claims of right, I do not mean to injure those which are real, and are such as their pretended rights would totally destroy.  If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the advantages for which it is made become his right.  It is an institution of beneficence; and law itself is only beneficence acting by a rule.  Men have a right to live by that rule; they have a right to justice, as between their fellows, whether their fellows are in politic function or in ordinary occupation.  They have a right to the fruits of their industry, and to the means of making their industry fruitful.  They have a right to the acquisitions of their parents, to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring, to instruction in life and to consolation in death.  Whatever each man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion