of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade or totally negligent of their duty.  The simple governments are fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them.  If you were to contemplate society in but one point of view, all these simple modes of polity are infinitely captivating.  In effect each would answer its single end much more perfectly than the more complex is able to attain all its complex purposes.  But it is better that the whole, should be imperfectly and anomalously answered than that while some parts are provided for with great exactness, others might be totally neglected, or perhaps materially injured, by the over-care of a favorite member.

The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes; and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are morally and politically false.  The rights of men are in a sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned.  The rights of men in governments are their advantages; and these are often in balances between differences of good,—­in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil.  Political reason is a computing principle:  adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, morally, and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral denominations.

By these theorists the right of the people is almost always sophistically confounded with their power.  The body of the community, whenever it can come to act, can meet with no effectual resistance; but till power and right are the same, the whole body of them has no right inconsistent with virtue, and the first of all virtues, prudence.  Men have no right to what is not reasonable, and to what is not for their benefit; for though a pleasant writer said, “Liceat perire poetis,” when one of them, in cold blood, is said to have leaped into the flames of a volcanic revolution, “ardentem frigidus AEtnam insiluit,” I consider such a frolic rather as an unjustifiable poetic license than as one of the franchises of Parnassus; and whether he were poet, or divine, or politician, that chose to exercise this kind of right, I think that more wise, because more charitable, thoughts would urge me rather to save the man than to preserve his brazen slippers as the monuments of his folly.

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The kind of anniversary sermons to which a great part of what I write refers, if men are not shamed out of their present course, in commemorating the fact, will cheat many out of the principles and deprive them of the benefits of the Revolution they commemorate.  I confess to you, Sir, I never liked this continual talk of resistance and revolution, or the practice of making the extreme medicine of the Constitution its daily bread.  It renders the habit of society dangerously valetudinary; it is taking periodical doses of mercury sublimate, and swallowing down repeated provocatives of cantharides to our love of liberty.