so much freedom, as would allow the diffusion of them, what lover of the temperate liberty of mankind, could hope, by mere violence, to produce it! A single tyrant, indeed, may be hurled from his throne,-for this the very ministers of his power, by whom he has been what he was, themselves may do,-while they bow the knee the very moment after, to some new tyrant of their own number, but it is tyranny which the patriot hates, and if that still subsist, the murder of a thousand tyrants, would make tyranny an object only of more sickly loathing.

It is enough, then, to find in the source of political authority, a justification of disobedience to it, in the extreme cases, in which alone it is morally allowable, or rather morally incumbent on the op. pressed to disobey. It is in extreme cases only, that this sanction can be required; and, in all the ordinary circumstances of society, to yield to the authority which all have concurred in obeying, when every constitutional method of obviating or mitigating the evil has been exerted, is at once the most virtuous, as it is the simplest, mode of conduct that can be pursued.

The next patriotic duty, which I mentioned, was the duty of defending the state against every aggression.

This duty of defending the land which we love, may, indeed, be considered, as implied, in the very love which we bear to it. It is not necessary, that we should think of what we have personally to lose, before we consider the invader of our country as our enemy. It is not necessary, even, that we should image to ourselves the desolation which he is to spread,-the massacres of blood and rapine, by which his conquest would be perpetrated, and the deeper massacres of oppression which would follow it. It is enough for us to think of him as the invader of our land; and in thus thinking of him, we have already felt the duty of opposition. We may, indeed, afterwards trace in our imagination, the sad series of consequences to those whom we directly love, and to those whom we love with a sort of indirect and borrowed affection, when we know nothing more of them than that they are our countrymen. We may think more abstractly, of the excellencies of our frame of laws which would be broken down, and feel an indignation at the outrage, as if this very frame of beautiful mechanism which we admire, were a living thing. But though our indignation may thus be more fully developed, as we develope

new causes of indignation, the strong emotion itself existed before. If the foot of an enemy with an enemy's purpose, be pressing our soil, we feel in the very moment in which we learn it, if our hearts be not thoroughly corrupt, that he who has presumed thus to advance, must either retreat or perish.

In states in which the citizens themselves are trained to habits of military defence, the emotion of course is stronger, because the importance of individual exertions is there most powerfully felt. But the feeling is one which exists, in some degree, in every people. Even under the most wretched system of government, which has united men as a nation, only to make the congregated multitude of slaves, an easier instrument of tyrannic power, than if they existed as individuals apart, there is still some patriotic reluctance felt, to allow the ingress of a foreign tyrant, though only a tyrant of the same species with him who is obeyed with ready submission, merely because he is a part of the country itself; and he who in such a case, has calmly suffered the march of the invader, which he might have assisted in repelling, will,in seeing him take possession of a land, which he can scarcely make more desolate, than its own sovereign had allowed it to continue,-feel some little portion of that self disapprobation, which the inhabitant of a land of freedom would have felt, if, in similar circumstances of aggression, he had given the aggressor as little reason to know, that the land which he was invading, was not a land of slaves, but the birth-place of men, and the dwelling-place of men.

The citizen, then, is to obey the laws and to defend them. These two duties relate to the political system that exists. He has still one other great duty, which relates not to things as they are, but to things as they may be. He is not to preserve the present system only; he is to endeavour, if it require or admit of amelioration of any sort, to render it still more extensively beneficial to those who live under it, and still more worthy of the admiration of the world than, with all its excellence, it yet may be.

He is justly counted a benefactor to his nation, who has been able to open to its industry, new fields of supply, and to open to the products of its industry, new distant markets of commercial demands. He too is a benefactor to the community, who plans and obtains the execution of the various public works, that facili

tate the, intercourse of district with district, or give more safety to navigation, or embellish a land with its best ornaments,-the institutions of charity or instruction. In accomplishing or contributing our aid to accomplish, these valuable ends, we perform a part of the duty which we are considering, the duty of augmenting, to the best of our ability, the sum of national happiness. But important as such exercises of public spirit are, they are not so important as the efforts of him, who succeeds in remedying some error in the system of government,-some error, perhaps, which has been, in its more remote influence, the retarding cause, on account of which those very public plans, which otherwise might have been carried into effect many ages before, were not even conceived as possible, till they were brought forward by that provident wisdom and active zeal, which have obtained, and justly obtained, our gratitude.

The reform of a single political grievance, may in its ultimate effects, be the producer of all which we admire in the thousand acts of individual patriotism,—the opener of fields of industry,— the diffuser of commerce,-the embellisher of a land,-the enlightener and blesser of those who inhabit it.

It is not possible, indeed, to estimate how valuable an offering he makes to society, who gives it a single good law. There are but a few words, perhaps, that compose it, but, in those few words, may be involved an amount of good, increasing progressively with each new generation; which, if it could have been made known, in all its amplitude, to the legislator, at the time when he contrived his project, would have dazzled and overwhelmed his very power of thought. What is true of a new law that relates to some positive institution is, as may be supposed, equally true of those laws which merely repeal and remedy the past; since a single error in policy, may in its long continuance, produce as much evil as a single wise enactment, may in its long continuance, produce of good.

He, then, is not a true lover of the society to which he belongs, nor faithful to those duties which relate to it, who contents himself with admiring the laws which he might amend; and who, far from wishing to amend them, regards, perhaps, or professes to regard, every project of reformation, not as a proposal which is to be cautiously weighed, but as a sort of insult to the dignity of the

whole system, which is to be rejected with wrath, and treated almost as a subject of penal censure. This blind admiration is not patriotism, or, if it be patriotism, it is, at least, only that easy form of it which the most corrupt may assume, without any diminution of their own political profligacy. He who does not feel, in his whole heart, the excellence of a wise and virtuous system of polity, is indeed, unworthy of living under its protection. But he who does feel its excellence, will be the swiftest to discern every improvement that can be added to it. It is the same in the humbler concerns of private life. It is not the indifferent stranger, who on seeing any one suffer from inconvenience of any kind, perceives most quickly the first involuntary intimation of uneasiness, and discovers, too, most quickly, what may be the best remedy. It is he who loves best the sufferer, and who sees best every noble endowment possessed by him. It is the mother watching her child, the friend visiting his friend,—the son, the lover, the husband. The very nature of affection, is to render us quick to imagine something, which may make still better what is good; and though he who admires least a system, may innovate most extensively, there can be no question, that the most continued tendency to innovate, in some slight degree, is in him who admires most, upon the whole, what he, therefore, wishes most evidently to improve.

If such be, as I cannot but think, the tendency of affection, the loud and haughty patriotism of those who profess to see in any of the systems of human policy,-which, as human, must share, in some degree, the general frailty of humanity,-no evil, which can require to be remedied, and even no good which can, by any means, be rendered still more ample in extension or degree, seems to me, for this very reason, suspicious;-at least as suspicious as the loud and angry patriotism of those, who profess to see in the whole system, nothing which is not a fit subject of instant and total alteration. If they loved truly what they praise so highly, they would not praise it less indeed, but they would wish, at least, to see it still more worthy of praise; there would be a quickness, therefore, to discover what would make it more worthy; and, though they might be fearful of innovating, they would yet have many wishes of innovating, which nothing but the value of the

subject of experiment, as too noble to be put in peril, could operate to suppress.

It is this high importance of the subject of experiment, which is the true check on the innovating spirit, that, but for such a check, would be constantly operating in man, though there were no other inducement, than the mere eagerness of curiosity, which wishes to see constantly new results, and is therefore constantly employed in placing objects in new circumstances. If the happiness and misery of nations were not dependent on the varying movements of the political machinery, or were dependent only for a few moments, so that, by the mere will of replacing all things in their former situation, we could truly replace them, without any diminution of good or increase of evil,-the game of legislation would indeed be the most magnificent game, which could arouse our idleness or activity. But since happiness, which has once been injured, cannot be easily, if at all repaired, nor misery, once produced, be immediately dissipated,-with the same ease with which we can shuffle kings, and queens, and knaves, and all the more insignificant cards, from the top to the bottom of the pack, or from the bottom to the top, and find the whole, after their successive changes, the same cards as before, with the same gaudy colouring and insignia of distinction,-the game is too costly a one for human benevolence to wish to play.

The same principle, I may remark, directs the patriot, in the reformations which he wishes to produce, without departing from the regular usages of the constitution, that directs him in those rare and dreadful cases, in which it becomes to him a question of virtue, whether he is not to throw off the whole entanglement of usage, and reduce society again for a time to a state of barbarous contention of man with man, that, from this temporary disorder, a better and more regular system may arise. The directing principle, in both cases, is the love of the good of the state and of mankind,—that total and ultimate result of good, on which it may be reasonable to calculate, after every deduction has been made of the evil that may, directly or indirectly, flow from the trial. It is not enough, then, that there is a great and manifest defect, in any part of the political system,-a source of evil, as manifest, perhaps, as the evil itself. This may be sufficient to the demagogue, whose only object is to produce popular discontent with a

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