Be Anarchy cursed, and be Tyranny damned; condemned
And who would to Liberty e’er be disloyal
May his son be a hangman—and he his first trial.
Burns was a philosopher whose mind had been trained to look at both sides of a question, and estimate truly their relationships to each other. Even in one of his beautiful poems to his wife, written after he was married, ‘I Hae a Wife o’ My Ain,’ he wrote:
I am naebody’s lord,
I’ll be slave to naebody.
While Burns was an intense lover of freedom, he had no sympathy with those who would overturn constituted authority. He wished to achieve the freedom of the people, but to achieve it by constitutional means. He was a national volunteer in Dumfries, and he composed a fine patriotic song for the corps to sing. He revealed his balanced mind in the following lines in that song:
The wretch that would a tyrant own,
And the wretch, his true-born brother,
Who would set the mob aboon the throne, above
May they be damned together.
Burns had as little respect for a king who was a tyrant, as he had for a tyrant in any other situation in life; but he clearly saw the wicked folly of allowing mob-rule to be substituted for constitutional authority.
In the Prologue written to be spoken by an actor on his benefit night, Burns wrote:
No hundred-headed Riot here we meet
With decency and law beneath his feet;
Nor Insolence assumes fair Freedom’s name.
Here, again, he records the dominant ideal of his mind through life; but at the same time he utters a warning against ignorant and wild theorists, who, in their madness, would overthrow civilisation.
He overflows again on his favourite theme in the ‘Lines on the Commemoration of Rodney’s Victory,’ when he was proposing toasts: