I need not descend into more particulars,to show the perpetuity of free government in Britain.Few men,even in this age,are so shamefully unacquainted with the history of their country,as to be ignorant of the principal events and signal revolutions,which have happened since the Norman era.One continued design against liberty hath been carried on by various methods,almost in every reign.In many,the struggles have been violent and bloody.But liberty still hath triumphed over force,over treachery,over corruption,and even under oppression.The altars of tyranny have been demolished as soon as raised;nay,even whilst they were raising,and the priests of that idol have been hewed to pieces:so that I will affirm,without the least apprehension of being disproved,that our constitution is brought nearer than any other constitution ever was,to the most perfect idea of a free system of government.One observation only I will make,before I leave this head,and it is this.The titles of those kings which were precarious,from circumstances of times,and notions that prevailed,notwithstanding the general acquiescence of the nation to them,afforded so many opportunities to our ancestors of better securing,or improving liberty.They were not such bubbles as to alter,without mending,the government;much less to make revolutions,and suffer by them.They were not such bubbles as to raise princes to the throne,who had no pretence to sit in it but their choice,purely to have the honour of bettering the condition of those princes,without bettering their own in proportion.--If what Ihave been saying appears a little too digressive from the main scope of this essay,I shall hope for indulgence from this consideration,that the natural effect of such reflections as I have made and suggested,must be to raise in our minds the honest ambition of emulating the virtue and courage of our forefathers,in the cause of liberty;and to inspire a reasonable fear,heightened by shame,of losing what they preserved and delivered down to us,through so many mixtures of different people,of Britons with Saxons,of both with Danes,of all three with Normans,through so many difficulties,so many dangers,so many revolutions,in the course of so many centuries.
There is another reason to be given,why the people of this island would be more inexcusable than any other,if they lost their liberty;and the opening and enforcing of this reason will bring us fully into our subject.
I supposed just now that our liberty might be ravished,or stolen from us;but I think that expression must be retracted,since it will appear,upon due consideration,that our liberty cannot be taken away by the force or fraud alone of those who govern;it cannot be taken away,unless the people are themselves accomplices;and they who are accomplices,cannot be said to suffer by one or the other.Some nations have received the yoke of servitude with little or no struggle;but if ever it is imposed upon us,we must not only hold out our necks to receive it,we must help to put it on.Now,to be passive in such a case is shameful;but to be active,is supreme and unexampled infamy.In order to become slaves,we of this nation must be beforehand what other people have been rendered by a long course of servitude;we must become the most corrupt,most profligate,the most senseless,the most servile nation of wretches,that ever disgraced humanity:for a force sufficient to ravish liberty from us,such as a great standing army is in time of peace,cannot be continued,unless we continue it;nor can the means necessary to steal liberty from us,be long enough employed with effect,unless we give a sanction to their iniquity,and call good evil,and evil good.
It may be said,that even the friends of liberty have sometimes different notions about it,and about the means of maintaining or promoting it;and therefore that even the British nation may possibly,some time or other,approve and concur in measures destructive of their liberty,without any intention to give it up,and much more without changing from the character which they have hitherto borne among the societies of mankind,to that infamous character I have just now supposed.If this were true,it would only furnish more reasons to be always on our guard,to be jealous of every extraordinary demand,and to reject constantly every proposition,though never so specious,that had a tendency to weaken the barriers of liberty,or to raise a strength superior to theirs.But I confess I do not think we can be led blindfold so far as the brink of the precipice.I know that all words,which are signs of complex ideas,furnish matter of mistake and cavil.We dispute about justice,for instance,and fancy that we have different opinions about the same thing;whilst,by some little difference in the composition of our ideas,it happens that we have onlY.different opinions about different things,and should be of the same opinion about the same thing.But this,I presume,cannot happen in the case before us.All disputes about liberty in this country,and at this time,must be disputes for and against the self-same fixed and invariable set of ideas,whatever the disputants on one side of the question may pretend,in order to conceal what it is not yet very safe to avow.No disputes can possibly arise from different conceptions of anything so clearly stated,and so precisely determined,as the fundamental principles are,on which our whole liberty rests.
