XXII
It is the force and violence of the English mind that has put it into the safe custody of the law, and it is every man’s disposition to act upon his own judgment and presumption, without regard to others, that has made it absolutely necessary to establish equal claims to curb them. We are too much in a state of nature to submit to what Burke calls ‘the soft collar of social esteem,’ and require ‘the iron rod, the torturing hour,’ to tame us. But though the foundations of liberty, life, and property, are formally secured in this way from the ebullitions of national character, yet the spirit breaks out upon the surface of manners, and is often spurted in our face. Lord Castlereagh was wrong in saying that ‘liberty was merely a custom of England;’ it is the indigenous growth of our temper and our clime; and woe to him who deprives us of the only amends for so many disadvantages and failings! The wild beast roaming his native forests is respectable though formidable—shut up in Exeter ‘Change, he is equally odious and wretched.