stituent parts,--and
the highest tribunal of all (from causes not for our present purpose to
examine) deprived of all that dignity and all that efficiency which
might enforce, or regulate, or, if the case required it, might supply
the want of every other court. Public prosecutions are become little
better than schools for treason,--of no use but to improve the dexterity
of criminals in the mystery of evasion, or to show with what complete
impunity men may conspire against the commonwealth, with what safety
assassins may attempt its awful head. Everything is secure, except what
the laws have made sacred; everything is tameness and languor that is
not fury and faction. Whilst the distempers of a relaxed fibre
prognosticate and prepare all the morbid force of convulsion in the body
of the state, the steadiness of the physician is overpowered by the very
aspect of the disease.[22] The doctor of the Constitution, pretending to
underrate what he is not able to contend with, shrinks from his own
operation. He doubts and questions the salutary, but critical, terrors
of the cautery and the knife. He takes a poor credit even from his
defeat, and covers impotence under the mask of lenity. He praises the
moderation of the laws, as in his hands he sees them baffled and
despised. Is all this because in our day the statutes of the kingdom are
not engrossed in as firm a character and imprinted in as black and
legible a type as ever? No! the law is a clear, but it is a dead letter.
Dead and putrid, it is insufficient to save the state, but potent to
infect and to kill. Living law, full of reason, and of equity and
justice, (as it is, or it should not exist,) ought to be severe, and
awful too,--or the words of menace, whether written on the parchment
roll of England or cut into the brazen tablet of Borne, will excite
nothing but contempt. How comes it that in all the state prosecutions of
magnitude, from the Revolution to within these two or three years, the
crown has scarcely ever retired disgraced and defeated from its courts?
Whence this alarming change? By a connection easily felt, and not
impossible to be traced to its cause, all the parts of the state have
their correspondence and consent. They who bow to the enemy abroad will
not be of power to subdue the conspirator at home. It is impossible not
to observe, that, in proportion as we approximate to the poisonous jaws
of anarchy, the fascination grows irresistible. In proportion as w