e, however, who thus feel it not to be worth while to be for ever
handling the abstract principles which are, after all, only clumsy
expressions of the real conditions that bring and keep men together in
society, yet nobody of any consideration pretends to silence or limit
the free discussion of these principles. Although a man is not likely to
be thanked who calls attention to the vast discrepancies between the
theory and practice of the constitution, yet nobody now would
countenance the notion of an inner doctrine in politics. We smile at the
line that Hume took in speaking of the doctrine of non-resistance. He
did not deny that the right of resistance to a tyrannical sovereign does
actually belong to a nation. But, he said, 'if ever on any occasion it
were laudable to conceal truth from the populace, it must be confessed
that the doctrine of resistance affords such an example; and that all
speculative reasoners ought to observe with regard to this principle
the same cautious silence which the laws, in every species of
government, have ever prescribed to themselves.' As if the cautious
silence of the political writer could prevent a populace from feeling
the heaviness of an oppressor's hand, and striving to find relief from
unjust burdens. As if any nation endowed with enough of the spirit of
independence to assent to the right of resistance when offered to them
as a speculative theorem, would not infallibly be led by the same spirit
to assert the right without the speculative theorem. That so acute a
head as Hume's should have failed to perceive these very plain
considerations, and that he should moreover have perpetrated the
absurdity of declaring the right of resistance, in the same breath in
which he declares the laudableness of keeping it a secret, only allows
how carefully a man need steer after he has once involved himself in the
labyrinths of Economy.[18]

In religion the unreasonableness of imposing a similar cautious silence
is not yet fully established, nor the vicious effects of practising it
clearly recognised. In these high matters an amount of economy and
management is held praiseworthy, which in any other subject would be
universally condemned as cowardly and ignoble. Indeed the preliminary
stage has scarcely been reached--the stage in which public opinion
grants to every one the unrestricted right of shaping his own beliefs,
independently of those of the people who surround him. Any woman, for
instanc