This prescription I had my share (a very full
share) in bringing to its perfection.[19] The Duke of Bedford will stand
as long as prescriptive law endures,--as long as the great, stable laws
of property, common to us with all civilized nations, are kept in their
integrity, and without the smallest intermixture of the laws, maxims,
principles, or precedents of the Grand Revolution. They are secure
against all changes but one. The whole Revolutionary system, institutes,
digest, code, novels, text, gloss, comment, are not only not the same,
but they are the very reverse, and the reverse fundamentally, of all the
laws on which civil life has hitherto been upheld in all the governments
of the world. The learned professors of the Rights of Man regard
prescription not as a title to bar all claim set up against old
possession, but they look on prescription as itself a bar against the
possessor and proprietor. They hold an immemorial possession to be no
more than a long continued and therefore an aggravated injustice.
Such are _their_ ideas, such _their_ religion, and such _their_ law. But
as to _our_ country and _our_ race, as long as the well-compacted
structure of our Church and State, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of
that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress
at once and a temple,[20] shall stand inviolate on the brow of the
British Sion,--as long as the British monarchy, not more limited than
fenced by the orders of the state, shall, like the proud Keep of
Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double
belt of its kindred and coeval towers, as long as this awful structure
shall oversee and guard the subjected land,--so long the mounds and
dikes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from all
the pickaxes of all the levellers of France.
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