for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites,—­in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity,—­in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption,—­in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.  Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.  It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.  Their passions forge their fetters.

This sentence the prevalent part of your countrymen execute on themselves.  They possessed not long since what was next to freedom, a mild, paternal monarchy.  They despised it for its weakness.  They were offered a well-poised, free Constitution.  It did not suit their taste or their temper.  They carved for themselves:  they flew out, murdered, robbed, and rebelled.  They have succeeded, and put over their country an insolent tyranny made up of cruel and inexorable masters, and that, too, of a description hitherto not known in the world.  The powers and policies by which they have succeeded are not those of great statesmen or great military commanders, but the practices of incendiaries, assassins, housebreakers, robbers, spreaders of false news, forgers of false orders from authority, and other delinquencies, of which ordinary justice takes cognizance.  Accordingly, the spirit of their rule is exactly correspondent to the means by which they obtained it.  They act more in the manner of thieves who have got possession of an house than of conquerors who have subdued a nation.

Opposed to these, in appearance, but in appearance only, is another band, who call themselves the Moderate.  These, if I conceive rightly of their conduct, are a set of men who approve heartily of the whole new Constitution, but wish to lay heavy on the most atrocious of those crimes by which this fine Constitution of theirs has been obtained.  They are a sort of people who affect to proceed as if they thought that men may deceive without fraud, rob without injustice, and overturn everything without violence.  They are men who would usurp the government of their country with decency and moderation.  In fact, they are nothing more or better than men engaged in desperate designs with feeble minds.  They are not honest; they are only ineffectual and unsystematic in their iniquity.  They are persons who want not the dispositions, but the energy and vigor, that is necessary for great evil machinations.  They find that in such designs they fall at best into a secondary rank, and others take the place and lead in usurpation which they are not qualified to obtain or to hold.  They envy to their companions the natural fruit of their crimes; they join to run them down with the hue and cry of mankind, which pursues