Nor is a disposition to find `every thing as it should be,'less at variance with itself,than with reason and utility.The commonplace arguments in which it vents itself justify not what is established,in effect,any more than they condemn it:since whatever now is established,once was innovation.
Precipitate censure,cast on a political institution,does but recoil on the head of him who casts it.From such an attack it is not the institution itself,if well grounded,that can suffer.What a man says against it either makes impression or makes none.If none,it is just as if nothing had been said about the matter:if it does make an impression,it naturally calls up some one or other in defence.For if the institution is in truth a beneficial one to the community in general,it cannot but have given an interest in its preservation to a number of individuals.By their industry,then,the reasons on which it is grounded are brought to light:from the observation of which those who acquiesced in it before upon trust,now embrace it upon conviction.Censure,therefore,though ill-founded,has no other effect upon an institution than to bring it to that test,by which the value of those,indeed,on which prejudice alone has stamped a currency,is cried down,but by which the credit of those of sterling utility is confirmed.
Nor is it by any means from passion and ill-humour,that censure,passed upon legal institutions,is apt to take its birth.When it is from passion and ill-humour that men speak,it is with men that they are in ill-humour,not with laws:it is men,not laws,that are the butt of arrogance.(4)Spleen and turbulence may indeed prompt men to quarrel with living individuals:
but when they make complaint of the dead letter of the Law,the work of departed lawgivers,against whom no personal antipathy can have subsisted,it is always from the observation,or from the belief at least,of some real grievance.The Law is no man's enemy:the Law is no man's rival.Ask the clamorous and unruly multitudeit is never the Law itself that is in the wrong:it is always some wicked interpreter of the Law that has corrupted and abused it.(5)Thus destitute of foundations are the terrors,or pretended terrors,of those who shudder at the idea of a free censure of established institutions.