present ruler.  It must then be a high principle which could exact obeisance from governments at the two extremes of polity, and from all modes of government inclusively; from the best and from the worst; from magistrates acting under obedience to the stedfast law which expresses the general will; and from depraved and licentious tyrants, whose habit it is—­to express, and to act upon, their own individual will.  Tyrants have seemed to feel that, if this principle were acknowledged, the subject ought to be reconciled to any thing; that, by permitting the free exercise of this right alone, an adequate price was paid down for all abuses; that a standing pardon was included in it for the past, and a daily renewed indulgence for every future enormity.  It is then melancholy to think that the time is come when an attempt has been made to tear, out of the venerable crown of the Sovereign of Great Britain, a gem which is in the very front of the turban of the Emperor of Morocco.—­(See Appendix D.)

To enter upon this argument is indeed both astounding and humiliating:  for the adversary in the present case is bound to contend that we cannot pronounce upon evil or good, either in the actions of our own or in past times, unless the decision of a Court of Judicature has empowered us so to do.  Why then have historians written? and why do we yield to the impulses of our nature, hating or loving—­approving or condemning according to the appearances which their records present to our eyes?  But the doctrine is as nefarious as it is absurd.  For those public events in which men are most interested, namely, the crimes of rulers and of persons in high authority, for the most part are such as either have never been brought before tribunals at all, or before unjust ones:  for, though offenders may be in hostility with each other, yet the kingdom of guilt is not wholly divided against itself; its subjects are united by a general interest to elude or overcome that law which would bring them to condign punishment.  Therefore to make a verdict of a Court of Judicature a necessary condition for enabling men to determine the quality of an act, when the ’head and front’—­the life and soul of the offence may have been, that it eludes or rises above the reach of all judicature, is a contradiction which would be too gross to merit notice, were it not that men willingly suffer their understandings to stagnate.  And hence this rotten bog, rotten and unstable as the crude consistence of Milton’s Chaos, ‘smitten’ (for I will continue to use the language of the poet) ’by the petrific mace—­and bound with Gorgonian rigour by the look’—­of despotism, is transmuted; and becomes a high-way of adamant for the sorrowful steps of generation after generation.