Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/346

 we understand, of an eminent poet and a minute philosopher of the present day, that the press ought to be shackled,—severely shackled; and particularly that the Edinburgh Review, the Examiner, and the Yellow Dwarf, as full of Examinerisms, ought to be instantly put down. Another poet or philosopher, who has not been so severely handled in these works, thinks differently; and so do we. Nay, Mr. ———— himself has been a long time in coming to this opinion; and no wonder, for he had a long way to come in order to arrive at it. But all the Kings that ever were, and ninety-nine out of a hundred of all the Priests that surround them, jump at this conclusion concerning the fatal consequences of the Liberty of the Press—by instinct. We have never yet seen that greatest calamity that can befalbefall [sic] mankind, deprecated by Mr. Burke, namely, literary men acting in corps, and making common cause for the benefit of mankind, as another description of persons act in concert and make common cause against them. He himself was an instance how little need be dreaded in this way. If the National Assembly had sent for Burke over, to assist in framing a Constitution for them, this traitor to liberty and apostate from principle, instead of loading the French Revolution with every epithet of obloquy and execration which his irritable vanity and mercenary malice could invent, would have extolled it to the skies, as the highest monument of human happiness and wisdom. But the genius of philosophy, as he said, is not yet known. It is a subject which we shall shortly endeavour to make clear.

"——'At this day When a Tartarean darkness overspreads The groaning nations; when the impious rule, By will or by established ordinance, Their own dire agents, and constrain the good To acts which they abhor; though I bewail This triumph, yet the pity of my heart Prevents me not from owning that the law, By which mankind now suffers, is most just."