have tripped with his pen into an intemperate expression in one or two
instances of a long work. If this severe duty were binding on your
conscience, the liberty of the press would be an empty sound, and no man
could venture to write on any subject, however pure his purpose, without an
attorney at one elbow and a counsel at the other.

From minds thus subdued by the terrors of punishment, there could issue no
works of genius to expand the empire of human reason, nor any masterly
compositions on the general nature of government, by the help of which the
great commonwealths of mankind have founded their establishments; much less
any of those useful applications of them to critical conjunctures, by
which, from time to time, our own Constitution, by the exertion of patriot
citizens, has been brought back to its standard. Under such terrors, all
the great lights of science and civilization must be extinguished; for men
cannot communicate their free thoughts to one another with a lash held over
their heads. It is the nature of everything that is great and useful both
in the animate and inanimate world, to be wild and irregular, and we must
be contented to take them with the alloys which belong to them, or live
without them. Genius breaks from the fetters of criticism, but its
wanderings are sanctioned by its majesty and wisdom when it advances in its
path: subject it to the critic, and you tame it into dulness. Mighty rivers
break down their banks in the winter, sweeping away to death the flocks
which are fattened on the soil that they fertilize in the summer: the few
may be saved by embankments from drowning, but the flock must perish for
hunger. Tempests occasionally shake our dwellings and dissipate our
commerce; but they scourge before them the lazy elements, which without
them would stagnate into pestilence. In like manner, Liberty herself, the
last and best gift of God to his creatures, must be taken Just as she is:
you might pare her down into bashful regularity, and shape her into a
perfect model of severe, scrupulous law, but she would then be Liberty no