Historical voices

We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst us.

We have not (as I conceive) lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century; nor as yet have we subtilized ourselves into savages.

Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers.

I suspect that this is owing to your forming a judgment of this nation from certain publications, which do, very erroneously, if they do at all, represent the opinions and dispositions generally prevalent in England.

We are generous enemies; we are faithful allies.

But to degrade and insult a man as the worst of criminals, and afterwards to trust him in your highest concerns, as a faithful, honest, and zealous servant, is not consistent in reasoning, nor prudent in policy, nor safe in practice.

A worse choice for such an office in a new commonwealth than that of a deposed tyrant could not possibly be made.

Justice is grave and decorous, and in its punishments rather seems to submit to a necessity than to make a choice.

But if I were to punish a wicked king, I should regard the dignity in avenging the crime.

The punishment of real tyrants is a noble and awful act of justice; and it has with truth been said to be consolatory to the human mind.

Deserters from principle, listed with fortune, they never see any good in suffering virtue, nor any crime in prosperous usurpation.

I tremble for the cause of humanity, in the unpunished outrages of the most wicked of mankind.

But misfortune is not crime, nor is indiscretion always the greatest guilt.

Justifying perfidy and murder for public benefit, public benefit would soon become the pretext, and perfidy and murder the end,--until rapacity, malice, revenge, and fear more dreadful than revenge, could satiate their insatiable appetites.

They would soon see that criminal means, once tolerated, are soon preferred.

They would not bear to see the crimes of new democracy posted as in a ledger against the crimes of old despotism, and the book-keepers of politics finding democracy still in debt, but by no means unable or unwilling to pay the balance.

There, where men follow their natural impulses, they would not bear the odious maxims of a Machiavelian policy, whether applied to the attainment of monarchical or democratic tyranny.

Indeed, the theatre is a better school of moral sentiments than churches where the feelings of humanity are thus outraged.

People would think the tears that Garrick formerly, or that Siddons not long since, have extorted from me, were the tears of hypocrisy; I should know them to be the tears of folly.

I should be truly ashamed of finding in myself that superficial, theatric sense of painted distress, whilst I could exult over it in real life.

As things now stand, with everything respectable destroyed without us, and an attempt to destroy within us every principle of respect, one is almost forced to apologize for harboring the common feelings of men.

France has always more or less influenced manners in England; and when your fountain is choked up and polluted, the stream will not run long or not run clear with us, or perhaps with any nation.

Even commerce, and trade, and manufacture, the gods of our economical politicians, are themselves perhaps but creatures, are themselves but effects, which, as first causes, we choose to worship.

We are but too apt to consider things in the state in which we find them, without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have been produced, and possibly may be upheld.