erflowing
with all generous emotions?

I hate where vice can bolt her arguments,
And virtue has no tongue to check her pride.

The man who interests himself for his country and its cause, who acts
bravely and independently, and knows that he runs some risk in doing
so, must have a strange opinion of the sacredness of truth, if the very
consciousness of having done nobly does not supply him with courage,
and give him that simple, unostentatious firmness, which shall carry
immediate conviction to the heart. It is a bitter lesson that the
institution of ballot teaches, while it says, "You have done well;
therefore be silent; whisper it not to the winds; disclose it not to
those who are most nearly allied to you; adopt the same conduct which
would suggest itself to you, if you had perpetrated an atrocious crime."

In no long time after the commencement of the war of the allies against
France, certain acts were introduced into the English parliament,
declaring it penal by word or writing to utter any thing that should
tend to bring the government into contempt; and these acts, by the mass
of the adversaries of despotic power, were in way of contempt called the
Gagging Acts. Little did I and my contemporaries of 1795 imagine, when
we protested against these acts in the triumphant reign of William Pitt,
that the soi-disant friends of liberty and radical reformers, when their
turn of triumph came, would propose their Gagging Acts, recommending to
the people to vote agreeably to their consciences, but forbidding them
to give publicity to the honourable conduct they had been prevailed on
to adopt!

But all this reasoning is founded in an erroneous, and groundlessly
degrading, opinion of human nature. The improvement of the general
institutions of society, the correction of the gross inequalities of our
representation, will operate towards the improvement of all the members
of the community. While ninety-nine in an hundred of the inhabitants
of England are carried forward in the scale of intellect and virtue,
it would be absurd to suppose that the hundredth man will stand still,
merely because he is rich. Patriotism is a liberal and a social impulse;
its influence is irresistible; it is contagious, and is propagated
by the touch; it is infectious, and mixes itself with the air that we
breathe.

Men are governed in their conduct in a surprising degree by the opinion
of others. It was all very well, when noblemen wer