to be carried, and where it ceases to
deserve the name of mercy and becomes a pernicious weakness? What
casuist, what lawyer, has ever been able nicely to mark the limits of
the right of selfdefence? All our jurists bold that a certain quantity
of risk to life or limb justifies a man in shooting or stabbing an
assailant: but they have long given up in despair the attempt to
describe, in precise words, that quantity of risk. They only say that
it must be, not a slight risk, but a risk such as would cause serious
apprehension to a man of firm mind; and who will undertake to say
what is the precise amount of apprehension which deserves to be called
serious, or what is the precise texture of mind which deserves to be
called firm. It is doubtless to be regretted that the nature of words
and the nature of things do not admit of more accurate legislation: nor
can it be denied that wrong will often be done when men are judges in
their own cause, and proceed instantly to execute their own judgment.
Yet who would, on that account, interdict all selfdefence? The right
which a people has to resist a bad government bears a close analogy to
the right which an individual, in the absence of legal protection, has
to slay an assailant. In both cases the evil must be grave. In both
cases all regular and peaceable modes of defence must be exhausted
before the aggrieved party resorts to extremities. In both cases an
awful responsibility is incurred. In both cases the burden of the proof
lies on him who has ventured on so desperate an expedient; and, if
he fails to vindicate himself, he is justly liable to the severest
penalties. But in neither case can we absolutely deny the existence
of the right. A man beset by assassins is not bound to let himself be
tortured and butchered without using his weapons, because nobody has
ever been able precisely to define the amount of danger which justifies
homicide. Nor is a society bound to endure passively all that tyranny
can inflict, because nobody has ever been able precisely to define the
amount of misgovernment which justifies rebellion.

But could the resistance of Englishmen to such a prince as James be
properly called rebellion? The thoroughpaced disciples of Filmer,
indeed, maintained that there was no difference whatever between the
polity of our country and that of Turkey, and that, if the King did not
confiscate the contents of all the tills in Lombard Street, and send
mutes with bowstrings