you is it secured?  It is secured against thieves and robbers; against idle and profligate men, who, however low your condition may be, would be glad to deprive you of the little you possess.  It is secured, not only against such disturbers of the public peace, but against the oppression of the noble, the rapacity of the powerful, and the avarice of the rich.  The courts of British justice are impartial and incorrupt; they respect not the persons of men; the poor man’s lamb is, in their estimation, as sacred as the monarch’s crown; with inflexible integrity they adjudge to every man his own.  Your property under their protection is secure.  If your personal liberty be unjustly restrained, though but for an hour, and that by the highest servants of the crown, the crown cannot screen them; the throne cannot hide them; the law, with an undaunted arm, seizes them, and drags them with irresistible might to the judgment of whom?—­of your equals—­of twelve of your neighbours.  In such a constitution as this, what is there to complain of on the score of liberty?

The greatest freedom that can be enjoyed by man in a state of civil society, the greatest security that can be given him with respect to the protection of his character, property, personal liberty, limb, and life, is afforded to every individual by our present constitution.

The equality of men in a state of nature does not consist in an equality of bodily strength or intellectual ability, but in their being equally free from the dominion of each other.  The equality of men in a state of civil society does not consist in an equality of wisdom, honesty, ingenuity, industry, nor in an equality of property resulting from a due exertion of these talents; but in being equally subject to, equally protected by the same laws.  And who knows not that every individual in this great nation is, in this respect, equal to every other?  There is not one law for the nobles, another for the commons of the land—­one for the clergy, another for the laity—­one for the rich, another for the poor.  The nobility, it is true, have some privileges annexed to their birth; the judges, and other magistrates, have some annexed to their office; and professional men have some annexed to their professions:—­but these privileges are neither injurious to the liberty or property of other men.  And you might as reasonably contend, that the bramble ought to be equal to the oak, the lamb to the lion, as that no distinctions should take place between the members of the same society.  The burdens of the State are distributed through the whole community, with as much impartiality as the complex nature of taxation will admit; every man sustains a part in proportion to his strength; no order is exempted from the payment of taxes.  Nor is any order of men exclusively entitled to the enjoyment of the lucrative offices of the State.  All cannot enjoy them, but all enjoy a capacity of acquiring them.  The son of the meanest man in the nation may become a general or an admiral, a lord chancellor or an archbishop.  If any persons have been so simple as to suppose that even the French ever intended, by the term equality, an equality of property, they have been quite mistaken in their ideas.  The French never understood by it anything materially different from what we and our ancestors have been in full possession of for many ages.