RIGHTS OF ENGLISHMEN. THE rights of Englishmen consist in the rights to personal security, personal liberty, and private property, confirmed by Magna Charta, the Habeas Corpus Act, the Bill of Rights, the Act of Settlement, and secured by the powers and privileges of Parliament, the limitation of the King's prerogative, the right to apply to Courts of Justice, the right to petition the King or either House of Parliament, and the right to have suitable arms for defence. These are our rights, and this the true goddess of liberty to whom an Englishman erects an altar upon his hearth, and whom he teaches his young children to reverence. She is supported by order, and justice, and religion, and holds in her right hand the book of the law, which she doth see equally dealt out to the least of her worshippers. She sanctions not the crimes committed in her name. She sits not upon a throne built of bones and skulls, hoisting caps and flags, red with the blood of her victims. It was not to support a spurious idol that those great men contended, whose names are disgraced by being made the watchword of every ignorant faction, Hampden, Russell, and Sydney. It was not to maintain her trophies that our countrymen bravely fought and nobly fell at Cressy and at Agincourt, at Trafalgar and at Waterloo; it was not physical force, mere bones and muscle, but the strong beating of hearts, indignant at tyranny, and full of the love of liberty, of order, and of justice by which England conquered. May these our rights and liberties thus nobly obtained for ever be preserved sacred! May they be deeply impressed on our own minds, and on the minds of our children! May they never be violated by the excesses of power: or, what is more to be dreaded, by the accession to power from the excesses of popular infatuation! May they, above all, never be polluted by the wild doctrines of demagogues! Athens once was what London now is; the seat of every private virtue: a city of refuge: the mansion house of liberty. Let us not be unmindful of its sad reverse! The decline and fall of empires proceed from causes as certain in their operation as any other cause in nature. In vain was this heedless people admonished that, as vice and folly hurry individuals to destruction, they convert a living nation into a sepulchre. The sophists prevailed-Phocion was condemned to death, and the decencies of burial were denied to his corpse. Athens is now a ruin. Of all those massive temples, whether built for pomp or for pleasure, in which were chanted the strains of sweet Menander, learned Euripides, lofty Sophocles, scarcely one stone stands upon another; and the walls that did echo them are laid low! The people are slaves: the city is commanded by a Vaivode, who buys his office of the chief of the black eunuchs, to whom the revenue belongs. The whole country is governed by unlettered barbarians. The plains of Marathon and the pass of Thermopyle are under the dominion of the Turks! Such are the bitter fruits of erroneous opinions upon liberty and property. Instead of promoting order, they mislead ignorance by teaching that restraint is tyranny. Instead of encouraging industry, they allure poverty by the delusion that property ought to be in common: that vice may consume the earnings of virtue: that one man may sow, and another reap: that the slothful drone who murmurs round the hive, may seize the honey which the industrious bee has carefully and cheerfully collected. |