most earnest entreaties for the forgiveness of their commander: not before the punishment, for it was too well known that then they would have been to no purpose, but days after it, when the bodily pain was remembered but as a dream. An invisible power it was, that quelled them, a power, which was therefore irresistible, because it took away the very will of resisting. It was the awful power of law, acting on natures pre-configured to its influences. A faculty was appealed to in the offender's own being a faculty and a presence, of which he had not been previously made aware,—but it answered to the appeal; its real existence therefore could not be doubted, or its reply rendered inaudible; and the very struggle of the wilder passions to keep uppermost counteracted their own purpose, by wasting in internal contest that energy which before had acted in its entireness on external resistance or provocation. Strength may be met with strength; the power of inflicting pain may be baffled by the pride of endurance; the eye of rage may be answered by the stare of defiance, or the downcast look of dark and revengeful resolve; and with all this there is an outward and determined object to which the mind can attach its passions and purposes, and bury its own disquietudes in the full occupation of the senses. But who dares struggle with an invisible combatant, with an enemy which exists and makes us know its existence-but where it is, we ask in vain ?—No space contains it-time promises no control over it-it has no ear for my threats-it has no substance, that my hands can grasp, or my weapons find vulnerable-it commands and can not be commanded-it acts and is insusceptible of my reaction the more I strive to subdue it, the more am I compelled to think of it—and the more I think of it, the more do I find it to possess a reality out of myself, and not to be a phantom of my own imagination; that all, but the most abandoned men, acknowledge its authority, and that the whole strength and majesty of my country are pledged to support it; and yet that for me its power is the same with that of my own permanent self, and that all the choice, which is permitted to me, consists in having it for my guardian angel or my avenging fiend! This is the spirit of law! the lute of Amphion, the harp of Orpheus! This is the true necessity, which compels man into the social state, now and always, by a still-beginning, never-ceasing, force of moral cohesion. Thus is man to be governed, and thus only can he be governed. For from his creation the objects of his senses were to become his subjects, and the task allotted to him was to subdue the visible world within the sphere of action circumscribed by those senses, as far as they could act in concert. What the eye beholds, the hand strives to reach; what it reaches, it conquers, and makes the instrument of further conquest. We can be subdued by that alone which is analogous in kind to that by which we subdue therefore by the invisible powers of our nature, whose immediate presence is disclosed to our inner sense, and only as the symbols and language of which all shapes and modifications of matter become formidable to us. But A machine continues to move by the force which first set it in motion. If only the smallest number in any state, properly so called, hold together through the influence of any fear that does not itself pre-suppose the sense of duty, it is evident that the state itself could not have commenced through animal fear. We hear, indeed, of conquests; but how does history represent these? Almost without exception as the substitution of one set of governors for another and so far is the conqueror from relying on fear alone to secure the obedience of the conquered, that his first step is to demand an oath of fealty from them, by which he would impose upon them the belief, that they become subjects; for who would think of administering an oath to a gang of slaves? what can make the difference between slave and subject, if not the existence of an implied contract in the one case, and not in the other? And to what purpose would a contract serve, if, however it might be entered into through fear, it were deemed binding only in consequence of fear? To repeat my former illustration-where fear alone is relied on, as in a slave ship, the chains that bind the poor victims must be material chains: for these only can act upon feelings which have their source wholly in the material organization. Hobbes has said, that laws without the sword are but bits of parchment. How far this is true, every honest man's heart will best tell him, if he will content himself with asking his own heart, and not falsify the answer by his notions concerning the hearts of other men. But were it true, still the fair answer would be-Well! but without the laws the sword is but a piece of iron. The wretched tyrant, who disgraces the present age and human nature itself, had exhausted the whole magazine of animal terror, in order to consolidate his truly Satanic government. But look at the new French catechism, and in it read the misgivings of his mind, as to the sufficiency of terror alone! The system, which I have been confuting, is indeed so inconsistent with the facts revealed to us by our own mind, and so utterly unsupported by any facts of history, that I should be censurable in wasting my own time and my reader's patience by the exposure of its falsehood, but that the arguments adduced have a value of themselves independently of their present application. Else it would have been an ample and satisfactory reply to an assertor of this bestial theory-Government is a thing which relates to men, and what you say applies only to beasts. Before I proceed to the second of these systems, let me remove a possible misunderstanding that may have arisen from the use of the word contract: as if I had asserted, that the whole duty of obedience to governors is derived from, and dependent on, the fact of an original contract. I freely admit, that to make this the cause and origin of political obligation, is not only a dangerous but an absurd theory; for what could give moral force to the contract? The same sense of duty which binds us to keep it, must have pre-existed as impelling us to make it. For what man in his senses would regard the faithful observation of a contract entered into to plunder a neighbor's house, but as a treble crime? First the act, which is a crime of itself; secondly, the entering into a contract which it is a crime to observe, and yet a weakening of one of the main pillars of human confidence not to observe, and thus voluntarily placing ourselves under the necessity of choosing between two evils;—and thirdly, the crime of choosing the greater of the two evils, by the unlawful observance of an unlawful promise. But in my sense, the word contract is merely synonymous with the sense of duty acting in a specific direction, that is, determining our moral relations, as members of a body politic. If I have referred to a supposed origin of government, it has been in courtesy to a common notion: for I myself regard the supposition as no more than a means of simplifying to our apprehension the ever-continuing causes of social union, even as the conversation of the world may be represented as an act of continued creation. For, what if an original contract had really been entered into, and formally recorded? Still it could do no more than bind the contracting parties to act for the general good in the best manner, that the existing relations among themselves (state of property, religion, and so forth), on the one hand, and the external circumstances on the other (ambitious or barbarous neighbors, and the like), required or permitted. In after-times it could be appealed to only for the general principle, and no more, than the ideal contract, could it affect a question of ways and means. As each particular age brings with it its own exigencies, so must it rely on its own prudence for the specific measures by which they are to be encountered. Nevertheless, it assuredly can not be denied, that an original, -more accurately, an ever-originating,-contract is a very natural and significant mode of expressing the reciprocal duties of subject and sovereign. We need only consider the utility of a real and formal state contract,-the Bill of Rights for instance, —as a sort of est demonstratum in politics; and the contempt lavished on this notion, though sufficiently compatible with the tenets of a Hume, will seem strange to us in the writings of a Protestant clergyman,* who surely owed some respect to a mode of thinking which God himself had authorized by his own example, in the establishment of the Jewish constitution. In this instance there was no necessity for deducing the will of God from the tendency of the laws to the general happiness: his will was expressly declared. Nevertheless, it seemed good to the divine wisdom, that there should be a covenant, an original contract, between himself as sovereign, and the Hebrew nation as subjects. This I admit was a written and formal contract; but the relations of mankind, as members of a body spiritual, or religious commonwealth, to the Saviour, as its head or regent;-is not this, too, styled a covenant, though it would be absurd to ask for the material instrument that contained it, or the time when it was signed or voted by the members of the church collectively.† * See Paley's Moral and Political Philosophy. B. vi. c. 3.—Ed. It is perhaps to be regretted, that the words, Old and New Testament, -they having lost the sense intended by the translators of the Bible,have not been changed into the Old and New Covenant. We can not too carefully keep in sight a notion, which appeared to the Primitive Church the fittest and most scriptural mode of representing the sum of the contents of the sacred writings. With this explanation, the assertion of an original or a perpetual contract is rescued from all rational objection; and however speciously it may be urged, that history can scarcely produce a single example of a state dating its primary establishment from a free and mutual covenant, the answer is ready: if there be any difference between a government and a band of robbers, an act of consent must be supposed on the part of the people governed. ESSAY III. Human institutions can not be wholly constructed on principles of science, which is proper to immutable objects. In the government of the visible world the Supreme Wisdom itself submits to be the author of the better; not of the best, but of the best possible in the subsisting relations. Much more must all human legislators give way to many evils rather than encourage the discontent that would lead to worse remedies. If it is not in the power of man to construct even the arch of a bridge that shall exactly correspond in its strength to the calculations of geometry, how much less can human science construct a constitution except by rendering itself flexible to experience and expediency: where so many things must fall out accidentally, and come not into any compliance with the preconceived ends: but men are forced to comply subsequently, and to strike in with things as they fall out, by after applications of them to their purposes, or by framing their purposes to them. SOUTH. THE second system corresponds to the second point of view under which the human being may be considered, namely, as an animal gifted with understanding, or the faculty of suiting measures to circumstances. According to this theory, every institution of national origin needs no other justification than a proof, that under the particular circumstances it is expedient. Having in my former essays expressed myself,-so at least I am conscious I shall have appeared to do to many persons ;-with comparative slight of the understanding considered as the sole guide of human conduct, and even with something like contempt and reprobation of the maxims of expedience, when represented as the only steady light of the conscience, and the absolute foundation of all morality; I shall perhaps seem guilty of an inconsistency, in declaring myself an adherent of this second system, a zealous advocate for |