to whom the
laws leave no hope of disturbing their equality?

"What has been told you of the republic of Sparta ought to
enlighten you on this question. No other State has had laws more in
accordance with the order of nature or of equality."

It is not to be wondered at that the 17th and 18th centuries should have
looked upon the human race as inert matter, ready to receive everything,
form, figure, impulse, movement, and life, from a great prince, or a
great legislator, or a great genius. These ages were reared in the study
of antiquity, and antiquity presents everywhere, in Egypt, Persia,
Greece, and Rome, the spectacle of a few men moulding mankind according
to their fancy, and mankind to this end enslaved by force or by
imposture. And what does this prove? That because men and society are
improvable, error, ignorance, despotism, slavery, and superstition must
be more prevalent in early times. The mistake of the writers quoted
above, is not that they have asserted this fact, but that they have
proposed it, as a rule, for the admiration and imitation of future
generations. Their mistake has been, with an inconceivable absence of
discernment, and upon the faith of a puerile conventionalism, that they
have admitted what is inadmissible, viz., the grandeur, dignity,
morality, and well-being of the artificial societies of the ancient
world; they have not understood that time produces and spreads
enlightenment; and that in proportion to the increase of enlightenment,
right ceases to be upheld by force, and society regains possession of
herself.

And, in fact, what is the political work which we are endeavouring to
promote? It is no other than the instinctive effort of every people
towards liberty. And what is liberty, whose name can make every heart
beat, and which can agitate the world, but the union of all liberties,
the liberty of conscience, of instruction, of association, of the press,
of locomotion, of labour, and of exchange; in other words, the free
exercise, for all, of all the inoffensive faculties; and again, in other
words, the destruction of all despotisms, even of legal despotism, and
the reduction of law to its only rational sphere, which is to regulate
the individual right of legitimate defence, or to repress injustice?

This tendency of the human race, it must be admitted, is greatly
thwarted, particularly in our country, by the fatal disposition,
resulting from classical teaching,