I must fairly tell you, that so far as my principles are concerned, (principles that I hope will only depart with my last breath,) that I have no idea of a liberty unconnected with honesty and justice.  Nor do I believe that any good constitutions of government, or of freedom, can find it necessary for their security to doom any part of the people to a permanent slavery.  Such a constitution of freedom, if such can be, is in effect no more than another name for the tyranny of the strongest faction; and factions in republics have been, and are, full as capable as monarchs of the most cruel oppression and injustice.  It is but too true, that the love, and even the very idea, of genuine liberty is extremely rare.  It is but too true that there are many whose whole scheme of freedom is made up of pride, perverseness, and insolence.  They feel themselves in a state of thraldom, they imagine that their souls are cooped and cabined in, unless they have some man or some body of men dependent on their mercy.  This desire of having some one below them descends to those who are the very lowest of all; and a Protestant cobbler, debased by his poverty, but exalted by his share of the ruling church, feels a pride in knowing it is by his generosity alone that the peer whose footman’s instep he measures is able to keep his chaplain from a jail.  This disposition is the true source of the passion which many men in very humble life have taken to the American war. Our subjects in America; our colonies; our dependants.  This lust of party power is the liberty they hunger and thirst for; and this Siren song of ambition has charmed ears that one would have thought were never organized to that sort of music.

This way of proscribing the citizens by denominations and general descriptions, dignified by the name of reason of state, and security for constitutions and commonwealths, is nothing better at bottom than the miserable invention of an ungenerous ambition which would fain hold the sacred trust of power, without any of the virtues or any of the energies that give a title to it,—­a receipt of policy, made up of a detestable compound of malice, cowardice, and sloth.  They would govern men against their will; but in that government they would be discharged from the exercise of vigilance, providence, and fortitude; and therefore, that they may sleep on their watch, they consent to take some one division of the society into partnership of the tyranny over the rest.  But let government, in what form it may be, comprehend the whole in its justice, and restrain the suspicious by its vigilance,—­let it keep watch and ward,—­let it discover by its sagacity, and punish by its firmness, all delinquency against its power, whenever delinquency exists in the overt acts,—­and then it will be as safe as ever God and Nature intended it should be.  Crimes are the acts of individuals, and not of denominations:  and therefore arbitrarily to class men under general descriptions, in order