The viper must be
held at a distance, and the tyger chained. But if a rigorous policy,
applied to enslave, not to restrain from crimes, has an actual tendency to
corrupt the manners, and to extinguish the spirit of nations; if its
severities be applied to terminate the agitations of a free people, not to
remedy their corruptions; if forms be often applauded as salutary, because
they tend merely to silence the voice of mankind, or be condemned as
pernicious, because they allow this voice to be heard; we may expect that
many of the boasted improvements of civil society, will be mere devices to
lay the political spirit at rest, and will chain up the active virtues more
than the restless disorders of men.
If to any people it be the avowed object of policy in all its internal
refinements, to secure only the person and the property of the subject,
without any regard to his political character, the constitution indeed may
be free, but its members may likewise become unworthy of the freedom they
possess, and unfit to preserve it. The effects of such a constitution may
be to immerse all orders of men in their separate pursuits of pleasure,
which they may on this supposition enjoy with little disturbance; or of
gain, which they may preserve without any attention to the commonwealth.
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