pinions for a tack."

But, though he was so keen and so consistent a champion of civil and
religious freedom, he was a sworn foe to anarchy and licence. Like most
people who had seen the later stages of the French Revolution, he had a
holy horror of mob-law and mob-justice. "If I am to be a slave," he said,
"I would rather be the slave of a king than of a rabble"; but he vehemently
objected to being the slave of either. He likened Democracy and Despotism
to the "two tubes of a double-barrelled pistol," which menaced the life of
the State. "The democrats are as much to be kept at bay with the left hand
as the Tories are with the right." "A thousand years," he wrote in 1838,
"have scarce sufficed to make our blessed England what it is: an hour may
lay it in the dust."

After the riots at Bristol in 1831, consequent on the rejection of the
Reform Bill, he strenuously demanded stern punishment for the rioters. He
wrote to the Prime Minister:--

"Pray do not be good-natured about Bristol. I must have ten people
hanged, and twenty transported, and thirty imprisoned; it is
absolutely necessary to give the multitude a severe blow, for their
conduct at Bristol has been most atrocious. You will save lives by it
in the end. There is no plea of want, as there was in the agricultural
riots."

_You will save lives by it in the end._ There spoke the truly humanitarian
spirit which does not shrink from drawing the sword at the bidding of real
necessity, but asks itself once and again whether any proposed effusion of
blood is really demanded by the exigencies of the moral law.

On questions of peace and war, Sydney Smith was always on the right
side.[157] He saw as clearly as the most clamorous patriot that England was
morally bound to defend her existence and her freedom. He exhorted her to
rally all her forces and strive with agonies and energies against the
anti-human ambition of Napoleon. And, when once the great deliverance was
achieved, he turned again to the enjoyment and the glorification of
Peace.--

"Let fools praise conquerors, and say the great Napoleon pulled down
this kingdom and destroyed that army: we will thank God for a
King[158] who has derived his quiet glory from the peace of his
realm."

"The atrocities, and horrors, and disgusts of war have never been half
enough insisted upon by the teachers of the people; but the worst of
evils and the greatest of folli