so backward and forward as
often as they like. They are masters of the commonwealth, because in
substance they are themselves the commonwealth. The French Revolution,
say they, was the act of the majority of the people; and if the majority
of any other people, the people of England, for instance, wish to make
the same change, they have the same right.

Just the same, undoubtedly. That is, none at all. Neither the few nor
the many have a right to act merely by their will, in any matter
connected with duty, trust, engagement, or obligation. The Constitution
of a country being once settled upon some compact, tacit or expressed,
there is no power existing of force to alter it, without the breach of
the covenant, or the consent of all the parties. Such is the nature of a
contract. And the votes of a majority of the people, whatever their
infamous flatterers may teach in order to corrupt their minds, cannot
alter the moral any more than they can alter the physical essence of
things. The people are not to be taught to think lightly of their
engagements to their governors; else they teach governors to think
lightly of their engagements towards them. In that kind of game, in the
end, the people are sure to be losers. To flatter them into a contempt
of faith, truth, and justice is to ruin them; for in these virtues
consists their whole safety. To flatter any man, or any part of mankind,
in any description, by asserting that in engagements he or they are
free, whilst any other human creature is bound, is ultimately to vest
the rule of morality in the pleasure of those who ought to be rigidly
submitted to it,--to subject the sovereign reason of the world to the
caprices of weak and giddy men.

But, as no one of us men can dispense with public or private faith, or
with any other tie of moral obligation, so neither can any number of us.
The number engaged in crimes, instead of turning them into laudable
acts, only augments the quantity and intensity of the guilt. I am well
aware that men love to hear of their power, but have an extreme
disrelish to be told of their duty. This is of course; because every
duty is a limitation of some power. Indeed, arbitrary power is so much
to the depraved taste of the vulgar, of the vulgar of every description,
that almost all the dissensions which lacerate the commonwealth are not
concerning the manner in which it is to be exercised, but concerning the
hands in which it is to be placed. Somewhere