that in any country a body duly constituted for any function will
neglect to perform its duty and abdicate its trust? Such a presumption
would go against all Governments in all nations. But in truth this
dread of penury of supply, from a free assembly, has no foundation in
nature. For first, observe that, besides the desire which all men have
naturally of supporting the honour of their own Government, that sense
of dignity, and that security to property, which ever attend freedom,
have a tendency to increase the stock of a free community. Most may be
taken where most is accumulated. And what is the soil or climate where
experience has not uniformly proved that the voluntary flow of
heaped-up plenty, bursting from the weight of its own luxuriance, has
ever run with a more copious stream of revenue than could be squeezed
from the dry husks of oppressed indigence by the straining of all the
politic machinery in the world?

That, whether you agree or disagree with its doctrine, is great prose.
That is Burke. 'O Athenian stranger,' said the Cretan I quoted in my
first lecture,--'inhabitant of Attica I will not call you, since you
deserve the name of Athene herself, because you go back to first
principles!'

But, you may object, 'Burke is talking like a book, and I have no wish to
talk like a book.' Well, as a fact, Burke is here at the culmen of a long
sustained argument, and his language has soared with it, as his way
was--logic and emotion lifting him together as upon two balanced majestic
wings. But you are shy of such heights? Very well again, and all credit
to your modesty! Yet at least (I appeal to that same modesty) when you
talk or write, you would wish to _observe the occasion_; to say what you
have to say without impertinence or ill-timed excess. You would not
harangue a drawing-room or a subcommittee, or be facetious at a funeral,