But we are all of us made to
shun disgrace, as we are made to shrink from pain and poverty and
disease. It is an instinct; and under the direction of reason, instinct
is always in the right. I live in an inverted order. They who ought to
have succeeded me are gone before me. They who should have been to me as
posterity are in the place of ancestors. I owe to the dearest relation
(which ever must subsist in memory) that act of piety which he would
have performed to me: I owe it to him to show that he was not descended,
as the Duke of Bedford would have it, from an unworthy parent.
The crown has considered me after long service: the crown has paid the
Duke of Bedford by advance. He has had a long credit for any service
which he may perform hereafter. He is secure, and long may he be secure,
in his advance, whether he performs any services or not. But let him
take care how he endangers the safety of that Constitution which secures
his own utility or his own insignificance, or how he discourages those
who take up even puny arms to defend an order of things which, like the
sun of heaven, shines alike on the useful and the worthless. His grants
are ingrafted on the public law of Europe, covered with the awful hoar
of innumerable ages. They are guarded by the sacred rules of
prescription, found in that full treasury of jurisprudence from which
the jejuneness and penury of our municipal law has by degrees been
enriched and strengthened.
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