crime.

Lord Keppel had two countries: one of descent, and one of birth. Their
interest and their glory are the same; and his mind was capacious of
both. His family was noble, and it was Dutch: that is, he was of the
oldest and purest nobility that Europe can boast, among a people
renowned above all others for love of their native land. Though it was
never shown in insult to any human being, Lord Keppel was something
high. It was a wild stock of pride, on which the tenderest of all hearts
had grafted the milder virtues. He valued ancient nobility; and he was
not disinclined to augment it with new honors. He valued the old
nobility and the new, not as an excuse for inglorious sloth, but as an
incitement to virtuous activity. He considered it as a sort of cure for
selfishness and a narrow mind,--conceiving that a man born in an
elevated place in himself was nothing, but everything in what went
before and what was to come after him. Without much speculation, but by
the sure instinct of ingenuous feelings, and by the dictates of plain,
unsophisticated, natural understanding, he felt that no great
commonwealth could by any possibility long subsist without a body of
some kind or other of nobility decorated with honor and fortified by
privilege. This nobility forms the chain that connects the ages of a
nation, which otherwise (with Mr. Paine) would soon be taught that no
one generation can bind another. He felt that no political fabric could
be well made, without some such order of things as might, through a
series of time, afford a rational hope of securing unity, coherence,
consistency, and stability to the state. He felt that nothing else can
protect it against the levity of courts and the greater levity of the
multitude; that to talk of hereditary monarchy, without anything else of
hereditary reverence in the commonwealth, was a low-minded absurdity,
fit only for those detestable "fools aspiring to be knaves" who began to
forge in 1789 the false money of the French Constitution; that it is one
fatal objection to all _new_ fancied and _new fabricated_ republics,
(among a people who, once possessing such an advantage, have wickedly
and insolently rejected it,) that the _prejudice_ of an old nobility is
a thing that _cannot_ be made. It may be improved, it may be corrected,
it may be replenished; men may be taken from it or aggregated to it; but
_the thing itself_ is matter of _inveterate_ opinion, and therefore
_cannot_ be