of man. Government is not
made in virtue of natural rights, which may and do exist in total
independence of it, and exist in much greater clearness, and in a much
greater degree of abstract perfection; but their abstract perfection is
their practical defect. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to
provide for human wants. Men have a right that these wants should be
provided for by this wisdom. Among these wants is to be reckoned the
want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their
passions. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their
liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.

But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and
circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be
settled upon any abstract rule; and nothing is so foolish as to discuss
them upon that principle. The moment you abate anything from the full
rights of men, each to govern himself, and suffer any artificial,
positive limitation upon those rights, from that moment the whole
organisation of government becomes a consideration of convenience. This
it is which makes the constitution of a state, and the due distribution
of powers, a matter of the most delicate and complicated skill.

When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and boasted of in any
new political constitutions, I am at no loss to decide that the
artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade, or negligent of their
duty. The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes, and in
proportion as they are metaphysically true they are morally and
politically false. The rights of men are in a sort of _middle_,
incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. But this
sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of
man that they have totally forgotten his nature. Without opening one new
avenue to the understanding, they have stopped up those that lead to the
heart.

_IV.--The Death of Chivalry_

As for the National Assembly, a majority, sometimes real, sometimes
pretended, captive itself, compels a captive king to issue as royal
edicts, at third hand, the polluted nonsense of their most licentious
and giddy coffee-houses. It is notorious that all their measures are
decided before they are debated. Amidst assassination, massacre, and
confiscation, perpetrated or meditated, they are forming plans for the
good order of future society. Who is it that admires, and from the heart
i