calls the "compunctious visitings of
Nature" will sometimes knock at their hearts, and protest against their
murderous speculations. But they have a means of compounding with their
nature. Their humanity is not dissolved; they only give it a long
prorogation. They are ready to declare that they do not think two
thousand years too long a period for the good that they pursue. It is
remarkable that they never see any way to their projected good but by
the road of some evil. Their imagination is not fatigued with the
contemplation of human suffering through the wild waste of centuries
added to centuries of misery and desolation. Their humanity is at their
horizon,--and, like the horizon, it always flies before them. The
geometricians and the chemists bring, the one from the dry bones of
their diagrams, and the other from the soot of their furnaces,
dispositions that make them worse than indifferent about those feelings
and habitudes which are the supports of the moral world. Ambition is
come upon them suddenly; they are intoxicated with it, and it has
rendered them fearless of the danger which may from thence arise to
others or to themselves. These philosophers consider men in their
experiments no more than they do mice in an air-pump or in a recipient
of mephitic gas. Whatever his Grace may think of himself, they look upon
him, and everything that belongs to him, with no more regard than they
do upon the whiskers of that little long-tailed animal that has been
long the game of the grave, demure, insidious, spring-nailed,
velvet-pawed, green-eyed philosophers, whether going upon two legs or
upon four.

His Grace's landed possessions are irresistibly inviting to an agrarian
experiment. They are a downright insult upon the rights of man. They are
more extensive than the territory of many of the Grecian republics; and
they are without comparison more fertile than most of them. There are
now republics in Italy, in Germany, and in Switzerland, which do not
possess anything like so fair and ample a domain. There is scope for
seven philosophers to proceed in their analytical experiments upon
Harrington's seven different forms of republics, in the acres of this
one Duke. Hitherto they have been wholly unproductive to
speculation,--fitted for nothing but to fatten bullocks, and to produce
grain for beer, still more to stupefy the dull English understanding.
Abbe Sieyes has whole nests of pigeon-holes full of constitutions
ready-mad