They may do well; and in doing well, they have the same title to our praise, which our best actions have to the glory with which we expect the world to be ready to reward us. If we withhold the approbation which is due, we take from them onc powerful incentive to continuance in that species of conduct, which rendered them worthy of approbation; and, at the same time, we take from them one of the most delightful feelings, of which he, who has sold his freedom, is still capable--the feeling, that he has done something, which was not actually sold with the very labour of his handsthat, in the additional duties performed by him, he has been free still-and that our praise is something, which, as it was not an actual condition, like the livery and the daily bread, is an offering to his own gratuitous virtue.

The duty of approbation, then, when approbation is due, is another of the duties which the master owes to the servant, and a duty which, though he may legally withhold it, he is not entitled morally to withhold.

But servants, as I have said, share not our love of praise only, but passions of a less commendable kind. They are assailed by temptations, like those which assail us; and they sometimes fall, as we, too, fall. They neglect to do what we have desired; and they often do what is positively injurious to us. In such cases, they might deserve all our severity of punishment, if we were not men, and they were not men. Our reproof they unquestionably deserve, not merely because they have failed in their part of our mutual contract, but also because our reproof may, even to them, be attended with moral advantage. Yet, though our reproof of any gross inattention is not excusable only, but, if we consider all its consequences, an act of humanity,—it is not to be the reproof of one who seems almost pleased with the offence itself, in the eagerness which is shown to reprehend it. In censuring, we are silently to have in mind the human weaknesses of our own moral nature; and to remember, that, if even we, with better light and nobler recreations, err, the ignorant, who, by their very ignorance, are incapable of seeing many of the consequences of actions, and who have few recreations but those which seduce them from what is good, may still more naturally be imagined to err. In condemning them, therefore, we condemn ourselves; or we declare that we are frail creatures, of whom less knowledge, and less virtue, are to be expected than of them. There are beings with gentle voices, and still gentler eyes, and with smiles that seem never to be willed, and scarcely even to fade and brighten again, but to be almost the native character of the countenance, like the very lustre that is ever blooming on the cheek and on the lip,-there are beings, who seem to exist thus only in a perpetual moral atmosphere of radiance and serenity, that, on the sight of a single particle of dust on a book, or a table, or a chair, as if, in that particle, a whole mountain of misery were before them, can assume in an instant all the frowns and thunders of all the furies,-whose delicate frame is too weak to bear the violent opening of a door, but not too weak, after the door is opened, to shake the very floor with the violence of their own wrath, on the unfortunate opener of it.

Indulgence to the lighter imperfections of servants is then an important part of our moral obligation, in that temporary domestic relationship which we have contracted. But though it is a duty which we owe to them, it is, at least, as much a source of tranquillity to ourselves. A life of constant upbraiding is very far from being a life of happiness. When we make them miserable, they have had already too good a revenge, in the very fretfulness of the anger that is wreaked on them.

If the mere human tendency to evil, that exists in the bosom of the servant, as it exists in his master's bosom, be a sufficient cause for the duty of indulgence, when indulgence would not be attended with hurtful consequences, as much to him whose offences are suffered to pass unrebuked, as to him who is directly injured, this tendency to evil is a source also of another duty, which is, in truth, the most important of all the duties that attend this domestic relation,—the duty of not corrupting the virtue of him, whose services only we have purchased; and whose moral part, which was not, and could not be sold to us, we are not to enfeeble, if we do not strengthen it. He who, after living under the same roof with us for years, quits our door without the amiable qualities with which he first entered it, every pure wish polluted, and new habits of licentiousness formed, while all that remains of early habits is a little remorse, that is soon overwhelmed in the turbulence of vulgar dissipation, though he may be far better skilled than before, in all the fashionable frivolities of his craft,-and though he may have acquired, in our service, by plunder, not by economy, what would enable him to rise to a better station, if it were not soon to be exhausted by the vices which he gathered at the same time,-quits us poorer upon the whole, and, as a mere human being, far lower in the scale of dignity, than when, with all his clownish awkwardness, he had virtues which it has been our misfortune, or rather, our guilt to destroy.

The only remaining set of duties to particular individuals, or classes of individuals, which we have to consider, are those which connect us with our fellow citizens.

That we should love the land of our birth,-of our happiness,-of that social system under which our happiness has been produced and protected, -the land of our ancestors, of all the great names and great deeds which we have been taught most early to venerate,-is surely as little wonderful as that we should feel, what we all truly feel, a sort of affection for the most trifling object, which we have merely borne about with us for any length of time. Loving the very land of our birth, we love those who inhabit it, who are to us, a part, as it were, of the land itself, and the part which brings it most immediately home to our affection and services. It is a greater recommendation to our good will, indeed, to be a relative, or a friend, or a benefactor; but it is no slight recommendation, even without any of these powerful titles, to be a fellow-countryman-to have breathed the same air, and trod the same soil, and lent vigour to the same political institutions, to which our own aid has actively or passively contributed. While all are fellow-citizens around us, indeed, we scarcely feel the force of the tie which binds us to each because we are bound equally to all. But, let our relative situation be changed: place us on some shore at a distance-in a society as civilized as that which we have left--with a brighter sky and warmer air-and all the occupations which business can give-or all the amusements, with which elegant frivolity can render days and evenings short to us ;-in the very hurry of pleasure, that scarcely allows us time to think of home, let but a single accent be heard of the native dialect familiar to our ear-and, if we have been long absent from our country, what benefactor or friend is there, or almost, I may say, what relative, however near to us in consanguinity and affection, who is for the moment or the hour, so interesting to our heart, as the stranger of whom we know nothing, but that he comes from the land which we love

above every other land, and is to us almost the representative of that land

itself.

Affection, though not the direct and exclusive source, is at least, by the bountiful provision of Heaven, the great accompaniment of duty; and where affection so strong is universally felt, there must be duties of no slight obligation.

Our countrymen may be considered by us individually, or as constituting one great community, in which the obligations due by us to all the separate individuals are concentrated, so as to form together, an amount of obligation, which those who would think but little of their duties to a single member of the community, cannot, with all their indifference, wholly disregard.

As individuals, their claim to our services is the same in kind, however weaker in degree, as that which a common descent gives to those who are connected with us by remote affinities of blood. We are not merely to abstain from injuring and to wish and endeavour to promote their happiness, when means of promoting it are in our power,—for these duties we owe to all mankind;--but when there is a competition of interests, and no obligations of more important duty are concerned, which should influence our choice, we are to prefer them to others who compete with them, our country being to us as it were a parent, and they, with us, its common offspring.

Beside this general interest in the happiness of all who live with us under the same government,—an interest in which you perceive the same beautiful relation of our affections to our means of readiest and most frequent usefulness, which we have traced in all the other species of peculiar regard, there are patriotic duties which we owe to some of our countrymen only; though, in truth, when we trace even these duties to their source, we find them too, to have their origin in that equal regard for the happiness of all, which we owe to all our fellow citizens. The duties to which I allude, are the offices of external respect, which we pay to those who are invested with high stations,-offices of respect, which the multitude pay, without any very nice analysis of the obligation, and which it is of the highest importance to public order, and to public happiness, that they should be ready thus to yield to the external symbols of authority, and which a wise and good man pays with the same readiness as the multitude, because he knows at once, how important they are to national tranquillity, and how very little it is, which, in the external forms of respect, is paid to the real happiness of the individual.

Such are the civic duties which we owe to individuals. The duties which we owe to our fellow-citizens, as constituting one great community, may be considered as reducible to three-first the duty of obedience to the system of laws under which we live, the benefit of which we all enjoy, and according to which all regulate their plans and expectations;-secondly, the duty of defending that social system, of which we are a part, from violent aggressions, foreign or internal ;-and thirdly, the duty of endeavouring, as far as we possess any power that can be beneficially exerted, to increase the means of public prosperity; and, above all, where political evils exist, to ameliorate a system of polity, which, though it produces much happiness, may still, by reformations, as far as these are practicable, be capable of producing more.

Our first patriotic duty of this general kind, is the duty of obedience. Why is it that we term obedience a duty,--what circumstances are there, in the nature of a system of government, by which, under certain limitations, it has a claim to our submission, merely because it already exists, and has long existed?

The answer to this question was, for a long time, even in our own land, a very simple one,-that power established, was established by God, and that disobedience to the individual whom he had established to exercise this power, would be a rebellion against right divine.

"Who first taught souls enslav'd and realms undone,
The enormous faith of many made for one :
That proud exception to all Nature's laws,

To invert the world and counterwork its Cause!
Force first made conquest, and that conquest law,
Till Superstition taught the tyrant awe,-

Then shared the tyranny, then lent it aid,

And gods of conquerors, slaves of subjects made."*

The argument, for the right divine of established power, which is in logic,
little better than any other argument for the right divine of any thing that
exists-whether good or evil merely as existing,-for the prevalent system
of manners, virtuous or vicious, or even, as has been truly said, for the
right divine of a wide spread fever, or any other pestilence, is as wretched
in its moral consequences, as it is ridiculous in logic; and it is painful to pe-
ruse the writings on the subject, which at one period-and that not a very
distant one-were so prevalent, and, in some cases, were the works of authors
whom we are accustomed to venerate, not merely as philosophers, but as men
who have given undoubted proofs of the most benevolent interest in the human
race. Berkeley, the author of the Theory of Vision,-Berkeley, the generous
possessor of "
every virtue under heaven," is the same Berkeley who endea-
vours to demonstrate to us, that it is as much our duty to submit to the most
ferocious tyrant, as to submit to the supreme benevolence of God,—or rather,
that to obey such a tyrant is to obey Supreme Benevolence.

That God, the equal God of all mankind, has not formed us to be the slaves of any individual, and in furnishing our minds with so many principles, that insure our progress in less important sciences, has not abandoned us, in the most important of all, to the selfishness of a power, which may prefer the present misery of its own despotic sway to all that can be offered for its reformation, because the reformation would abridge an authority which it is inore convenient for the possessor of it, to exercise with no limit but that of will, I surely need not now attempt to prove to you. On the right divine of authority, whatever vague allusions to it we may sometimes find in courtly flatterers of the day, we have no writers now who require to be confuted.

There is, indeed, one species of right divine which established authority does possess, its tendency to the peace of those who submit to it, and consequently, in that respect to their happiness, which, as the object of our Creator, has the sanction of divine will. But it possesses this right divine, only as tending to public happiness, it is secondary only, not primary ; and when the public happiness, instead of being upon the whole, promoted by obedience, would, upon the whole, when every consequence, indirect as well as direct, is taken into account, be promoted, by shaking off that power which is inconsistent with its great object,-remonstrance, even rebellion itself, if that name can justly be given, in such circumstances of dreadful necessity, to the expression of the public will,-has as truly its right divine, as established authority, even in its best state, could be said to have it, * Pope's Essay on Man, Ep. III. 241–249. 52

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when, as exercised with happier tenderness, it was productive of that good, in which alone the divinity of its right is to be found.

We have no need, then, of all those fictions to which political writers, in periods in which the true source of political obligation was less distinctly perceived, were obliged to have recourse, in asserting the rights of the governed, as paramount to the claims of mere possession, in the tyrannical governor. We have no need to speak of original compacts, of those who obey with those who command, understood as prior to the existing forms of social institutions, and the violation of which by one party, might be considered as a warrant to the other party for resuming the original rights, of which they had consented through their ancestors, to divest themselves. Such compacts never existed, and could not, independently of the good that might flow from them, be of obligation on the new individuals, who form the present race of mankind, though they had truly taken place at some remote period. The only reason for which we could conceive it necessary for men at present, to pay the obedience which another number of men, at any other period, paid to a certain number of their fellow-creatures, who lived in their time, is, that a failure in this obedience, of the propriety of which the existing generation are equally capable of judging, or better capable, if political knowledge have made the slightest progress, would seem to be injurious to the society in which they live; and, if this reason be valid, it is valid without the necessity of the compact supposed. It is our duty to obey, because mankind-at least that large part of mankind, which we term our country, -would suffer, upon the whole, if we were not to obey. This is the powerful hold which even imperfect governments possess on the obedience of the wise and good; and the stronger holds which they may seem to have, by corruption, or by mere usage of unreflecting veneration, on the profligate and the ignorant, is truly not half so strong. The profligate supporter of a system, for which he cares only as it ministers to his vices, may see, perhaps, some more tempting promise of wealth and power, in a rebellion against that very authority, the slightest attempt to ameliorate which, he has been accustomed to represent as a species of treason. The ignorant, who fall on their knees to-day, merely because something is passing which is very magnificent, and before which other knees are bent, or bending, may, to-morrow, when other arms are lifted in tumultuous rebellion, join their arms to the tumult and the dreadful fury of the day. It is only in the bosom of the wise and good, as I have said, that any security of obedience is to be found. He who is worthy of those honourable names-who is wise to consult for the public weal, which his goodness wishes, has no object but the happiness of the community; and though he may see imperfections in government which tend to lessen this happiness, he yet knows how much is to be hoped from the calın influence of diffusive knowledge, and how very little is to be hoped from the exercise of force,-which would be opposed not by mere force of arms, but by the force of as many bad passions as could be summoned to resist it; and which would too often, also, be obliged to call to its own aid passions, as little worthy of the sacred cause in which they might be engaged, as the very passions that were opposed to him. He weighs good with good, evil with evil;--and the oppression must, indeed, be severe, and the prospect of relief from it by other means be truly gloomy, before he will lift his voice to call his fellow-citizens to arm against their fellow-citizens. "The speculative line of demarcation, where obedience ought to end, and resistance must