o; the liberty of the press is
guaranteed by the Constitution."]

That between two men, both eager in the service of one common cause,
there should arise a difference of opinion as to the _means_ of
serving it is but a natural result of the varieties of human
judgment, and detracts nothing from the zeal or sincerity of either.
But by those who do not suffer themselves to be carried away by a
theory, it will be conceded, I think, that the scruples professed by
Lord Byron, with respect to the expedience or safety of introducing
what is called a Free Press into a country so little advanced in
civilisation as Greece, were founded on just views of human nature
and practical good sense. To endeavour to force upon a state of
society, so unprepared for them, such full grown institutions; to
think of engrafting, at once, on an ignorant people the fruits of
long knowledge and cultivation,--of importing among them, ready made,
those advantages and blessings which no nation ever attained but by
its own working out, nor ever was fitted to enjoy but by having first
struggled for them; to harbour even a dream of the success of such an
experiment, implies a sanguineness almost incredible, and such as,
though, in the present instance, indulged by the political economist
and soldier, was, as we have seen, beyond the poet.

The enthusiastic and, in many respects, well founded confidence with
which Colonel Stanhope appealed to the authority of Mr. Bentham on
most of the points at issue between himself and Lord Byron, was, from
that natural antipathy which seems to exist between political
economists and poets, but little sympathised in by the latter;--such
appeals being always met by him with those sallies of ridicule, which
he found the best-humoured vent for his impatience under argument,
and to which, notwithstanding the venerable name and services of Mr.
Bentham himself, the quackery of much that is promulgated by his
followers presented, it must be owned, ample scope. Romantic, indeed,
as was Lord Byron's sacrifice of himself to the cause of Greece,
there was in the views he took of the means of serving her not a
tinge of the unsubstantial or speculative. The grand practical task
of freeing her from her tyrants was his first and main object. He
knew that slavery was the great bar to knowledge, and must be broken
through before her light could come; that the work of the sword must
therefore precede that of the pen, and camps be the fi