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 follies have been varnished over with specious names, and the gigantic robbers and murderers of the world have been holden up for imitation to the weak eyes of youth.”

No wars, except the very few which we really required for national self-defence, could attract his sympathy.  Wars of intervention in the affairs of other nations, even when undertaken for excellent objects, he regarded with profound mistrust.

When in 1823, the nascent liberties of Spain were threatened, he wrote:—­