to act, are very different from those of a king. He encounters with men who
are unused to disparity; he is obliged, for his own security, to hold the
dagger continually unsheathed. When he hopes to be safe, he possibly means
to be just; but is hurried, from the first moment of his usurpation, into
every exercise of despotical power. The heir of a crown has no such quarrel
to maintain with his subjects: his situation is flattering; and the heart
must be uncommonly bad that does not glow with affection to a people, who
are at once his admirers, his support, and the ornaments of this reign. In
him, perhaps, there is no explicit design of trespassing on the rights of
his subjects; but the forms intended to preserve their freedom are not, on
this account, always safe in his hands.

Slavery has been imposed upon mankind in the wantonness of a depraved
ambition, and tyrannical cruelties have been committed in the gloomy hours
of jealousy and terror; yet these demons are not necessary to the creation,
or to the support of an arbitrary power. Although no policy was ever more
successful than that of the Roman republic in maintaining a national
fortune; yet subjects, as well as their princes, frequently imagine that
freedom is a clog on the proceedings of government: they imagine, that
despotical power is best fitted to procure despatch and secrecy in the
execution of public councils; to maintain what they are pleased to call
_political order_, [Footnote: Our notion of order in civil society
being taken from the analogy of subjects inanimate and dead, is frequently
false; we consider commotion and action as contrary to its nature; we think
that obedience, secrecy, and the silent passing of affairs through the
hands of a few, are its real constituents. The good order of stones in a
wall, is their being properly fixed in the places for which they are hewn;
were they to stir, the building must fall: but the good order of men in
society, is their being placed where they are properly qualified to act.
The first is a fabric made of dead and inanimate parts, the second is made