.

Having thus paid Mr. Burke the compliment of remembering him, I return
to the subject.

From the want of a constitution in England to restrain and regulate the
wild impulse of power, many of the laws are irrational and tyrannical,
and the administration of them vague and problematical.

The attention of the government of England (for I rather choose to
call it by this name than the English government) appears, since its
political connection with Germany, to have been so completely engrossed
and absorbed by foreign affairs, and the means of raising taxes, that it
seems to exist for no other purposes. Domestic concerns are neglected;
and with respect to regular law, there is scarcely such a thing.

Almost every case must now be determined by some precedent, be that
precedent good or bad, or whether it properly applies or not; and
the practice is become so general as to suggest a suspicion, that it
proceeds from a deeper policy than at first sight appears.

Since the revolution of America, and more so since that of France,
this preaching up the doctrines of precedents, drawn from times and
circumstances antecedent to those events, has been the studied practice
of the English government. The generality of those precedents are
founded on principles and opinions, the reverse of what they ought; and
the greater distance of time they are drawn from, the more they are to
be suspected. But by associating those precedents with a superstitious
reverence for ancient things, as monks show relics and call them holy,
the generality of mankind are deceived into the design. Governments now
act as if they were afraid to awaken a single reflection in man. They
are softly leading him to the sepulchre of precedents, to deaden his
faculties and call attention from the scene of revolutions. They feel
that he is arriving at knowledge faster than they wish, and their policy
of precedents is the barometer of their fears. This political popery,
like the ecclesiastical popery of old, has had its day, and is hastening
to its exit. The ragged relic and the antiquated precedent, the monk and
the monarch, will moulder together.

Government by precedent, without any regard to the principle of the
precedent, is one of the vilest systems that can be set up. In numerous
instances, the precedent ought to operate as a warning, and not as an
example, and requires to be shunned instead of imitated; but instead of
this, precedents are taken in the lump