the spring for their own necessities, flowed forth with a perpetual stream to refresh far distant lands. Meanwhile the language of municipal law underwent a very partial improvement. It ceased to press upon that part of the community who had succeeded in releasing themselves from bondage; and sometimes those who had obtained a participation in political power introduced into its enactments some of those just principles to which they had been indebted for their own deliverance. But the selfish fear, that from henceforth they had more to lose than to gain from the general ascendancy of truth and justice, disposed them to limit the application of those principles to their own particular case; and to shrink from substituting them broadly and universally for the language of the older constitution of things.

The repetition of this process in successive generations brings us to a state of things, in which most classes of the community have secured to themselves all the rights which equal justice could require; in which all have gained the simplest and most necessary of these rights; in which the

great principles of the eternal law are most widely known, and upheld by the unanimous voice of the wise and good; but in which the municipal or written law of the land has not yet learnt to avow those principles, but still retains amidst great partial improvements much of the narrow and iniquitous spirit of its earliest origin. It was at first a mere system of exclusion: and so far from being the standard in great questions of national right, every victory gained by public right has necessarily led to the improvement of the law, and could have only been rendered legal by the law's alteration. Nay, as those very alterations from various causes have generally expressed the particular application of principles, rather than the principles themselves, and as their particular application may greatly vary with times and circumstances, so it may sometimes happen, that laws promulgated in one age to further the cause of liberty and justice, may in another have the very opposite tendency, and must be repealed in the letter if we wish to fulfil their spirit.

What I meant then by the original error of the

political creed of many good men, is the principle that in all questions of political alteration the presumption is against change. Now on the contrary the presumption is always in favour of change, because the origin of our existing societies was an unjust and ignorant system; because where that system has not been altered, it must require to be so; and even where it has, as the alteration was often of a temporary and particular nature, a fresh improvement will be generally desirable, if we wish to secure the substantial principle of justice and wisdom.

A similar fallacy is involved in another argument, commonly used by the enemies of improvement, that the constitution must not be tampered with. Now this is a plea of considerable weight wherever the existing order of things is the result of one comprehensive plan; wherever the claims of the different elements of the social body have been impartially weighed, and each has received that exact proportion of power and consequence which a sound view of the general good would assign to it. Under such circumstances partial alterations may

mar the symmetry of the whole; and a general change is not likely to be needed. But where the existing constitution is the mere result of various partial and independent reforms, each of which redressed one particular grievance, while incongruities in the rest of the body politic were suffered to continue unheeded; it is worse than idle to speak of it as one uniform system, digested by comprehensive wisdom; and to deprecate the repetition of those particular reforms to which all its excellence is owing, and which may by easy gradations bring it at last to a practical perfection, without the necessity of a complete revolution.

These remarks apply to the history of almost all nations; except those which have received an entire constitution at one particular time, founded on comprehensive views of the rights and interests of all orders of men in the country, and providing justly and wisely for the good of each and of all. Where such a constitution has been digested, proposals for any partial subsequent reforms are justly to be regarded with strong suspicion; because where the parts of a system have been expressly framed

with a view to each other and to the whole, an alteration in any one of them introduced with a particular object is likely to harmonize ill with the rest, and to produce a general inconvenience greater than the local one which it was designed to remedy.

But it has rarely or never happened that the terms of this hypothesis have been fully complied with. In the constitutions given by the lawgivers of antiquity, or in that actually enjoyed by the United States of America, although these were framed much more on certain general principles than the constitutions of modern Europe, yet there was an order of men which they did not embrace, which formed no part in the civil edifice, and with regard to which the system of the legislator was imperfect, and required future revision. While all classes of citizens were provided for, there was a class of men which remained unregarded, and whom justice seemed to have abandoned-the class of predial or domestic slaves. Among the ancient lawgivers indeed, the time perhaps was never contemplated, when justice should have her perfect work, and all