Those who say this, however, promise too much. Duty and common sense oblige us to watch the man we suspect, even though he should swear he is innocent. Would not the same precautions, which we are still obliged to employ, to secure us against his duplicity have sufficiently answered our purpose, without putting him to this purgation? Are there no methods by which we can find whether a man be the proper subject in whom to repose an important trust, without putting the question to himself? Will not he who is so dangerous an enemy that we cannot suffer him at large, discover his enmity by his conduct, without reducing us to the painful necessity of tempting him to an act of prevarication? If he be so subtle a hypocrite that all our vigilance cannot detect him, will he scruple to add to his other crimes the guilt of perjury?
Whether the test we impose be merely intended to operate as an exclusion from office, or to any more considerable disadvantage, the disability it introduces is still in the nature of a punishment. It treats the individual in question as an unsound member of society, as distinguished, in an unfavourable sense, from the majority of his countrymen, and possessing certain attributes detrimental to the general interest. In the eye of reason, human nature is capable of no other guilt than this. Society is authorized to animadvert upon a certain individual, in the case of murder, for example, not because he has done an action that he might have avoided, not because he was sufficiently informed of the better, and obstinately chose the worse; for this is impossible, every man necessarily does that which he at the time apprehends to be best:Chapter ut because his habits and character render him dangerous to society, in the same sense as a wolf or a blight would be dangerous. It must, no doubt, be an emergency of no common magnitude that can justify a people in putting a mark of displeasure upon a man for the opinions he entertains, be they what they may. But, taking for granted, for the present, the propriety of such a measure, it would certainly be just as equitable to administer, to the man accused for murder, an oath of purgation, as to the man accused of disaffection to the established order of society. The proof of this injustice is to be found in the nature of punishment. It would be well, in ordinary cases at least, that a man were allowed to propose to his neighbour what questions he pleased, and, in general, his duty would prompt him to give an explicit answer. But, when you punish a man, you suspend the treatment that is due to him as a rational being, and consequently your own claim to a reciprocation of that treatment. You demand from him an impartial confession at the same time that you employ a most powerful motive to prevarication, and menace him with a serious injury in return for his ingenuousness.