titutions and commonwealths, is nothing better at bottom than
the miserable invention of an ungenerous ambition which would fain hold
the sacred trust of power, without any of the virtues or any of the
energies that give a title to it,--a receipt of policy, made up of a
detestable compound of malice, cowardice, and sloth. They would govern
men against their will; but in that government they would be discharged
from the exercise of vigilance, providence, and fortitude; and
therefore, that they may sleep on their watch, they consent to take some
one division of the society into partnership of the tyranny over the
rest. But let government, in what form it may be, comprehend the whole
in its justice, and restrain the suspicious by its vigilance,--let it
keep watch and ward,--let it discover by its sagacity, and punish by its
firmness, all delinquency against its power, whenever delinquency exists
in the overt acts,--and then it will be as safe as ever God and Nature
intended it should be. Crimes are the acts of individuals, and not of
denominations: and therefore arbitrarily to class men under general
descriptions, in order to proscribe and punish them in the lump for a
presumed delinquency, of which perhaps but a part, perhaps none at all,
are guilty, is indeed a compendious method, and saves a world of trouble
about proof; but such a method, instead of being law, is an act of
unnatural rebellion against the legal dominion of reason and justice;
and this vice, in any constitution that entertains it, at one time or
other will certainly bring on its ruin.

We are told that this is not a religious persecution; and its abettors
are loud in disclaiming all severities on account of conscience. Very
fine indeed! Then, let it be so: they are not persecutors; they are only
tyrants. With all my heart. I am perfectly indifferent concerning the
pretexts upon which we torment one another,--or whether it be for the
constitution of the Church of England, or for the constitution of the
State of England, that people choose to make their fellow-creatures
wretched. When we were sent into a place of authority, you that sent us
had yourselves but one commission to give. You could give us none to
wrong or oppress, or even to suffer any kind of oppression or wrong, on
any grounds whatsoever: not on political, as in the affairs of America;
not on commercial, as in those of Ireland; not in civil, as in the laws
for debt; not in religious, as in the