The rights of men are in a sort of _middle_,
incapable of definition, but not impossible to be discerned. The rights
of men in governments are their advantages; and these are often in
balances between differences of good,--in compromises sometimes between
good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil. Political reason is
a computing principle: adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing,
morally, and not metaphysically or mathematically, true moral
denominations.
By these theorists the right of the people is almost always
sophistically confounded with their power. The body of the community,
whenever it can come to act, can meet with no effectual resistance; but
till power and right are the same, the whole body of them has no right
inconsistent with virtue, and the first of all virtues, prudence. Men
have no right to what is not reasonable, and to what is not for their
benefit; for though a pleasant writer said, "_Liceat perire poetis_,"
when one of them, in cold blood, is said to have leaped into the flames
of a volcanic revolution, "_ardentem frigidus AEtnam insiluit_," I
consider such a frolic rather as an unjustifiable poetic license than
as one of the franchises of Parnassus; and whether he were poet, or
divine, or politician, that chose to exercise this kind of right, I
think that more wise, because more charitable, thoughts would urge me
rather to save the man than to preserve his brazen slippers as the
monuments of his folly.
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