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, and put at once for constitution
and for law.

Either the doctrine of precedents is policy to keep a man in a state of
ignorance, or it is a practical confession that wisdom degenerates in
governments as governments increase in age, and can only hobble along by
the stilts and crutches of precedents. How is it that the same persons
who would proudly be thought wiser than their predecessors, appear at
the same time only as the ghosts of departed wisdom? How strangely is
antiquity treated! To some purposes it is spoken of as the times of
darkness and ignorance, and to answer others, it is put for the light of
the world.

If the doctrine of precedents is to be followed, the expenses of
government need not continue the same. Why pay men extravagantly, who
have but little to do? If everything that can happen is already in
precedent, legislation is at an end, and precedent, like a dictionary,
determines every case. Either, therefore, government has arrived at
its dotage, and requires to be renovated, or all the occasions for
exercising its wisdom have occurred.

We now see all over Europe, and particularly in England, the curious
phenomenon of a nation looking one way, and the government the
other--the one forward and the other backward. If governments are to go
on by precedent, while nations go on by improvement, they must at last
come to a final separation; and the sooner, and the more civilly they
determine this point, the better.*[20]

Having thus spoken of