Wesley Corpus

Why are you thus wringing your hands, and screaming, to the terror of your quiet neighbours, “Destruction | slavery 1 bondage ' Help, countrymen | Our liberty is destroyed! Weare ruined, chained, fettered, undone!” Fettered ! How? Where are the fetters, but in your own imagination? There are none, either on your hands or mine: Neither you nor I can show to any man in his senses, that we have one chain upon us, even so big as a knitting-needle. 23. I do not say, that the ministry are without fault; or that they have done all things well. But still I ask, What is the liberty which we want? It is not civil or religious liberty. These we have in such a degree as was never known before, not from the times of William the Conqueror.” But all this is nothing; this will never satisfy the bellua multorum capitum. That “many-headed beast,” the people, roars for liberty of another kind. Many want Indian liberty, the liberty of cutting throats, or of driving a brace of balls * If the famous Middlesex election was an exception to this, yet observe, one Swallow makes no summer. through the head of those ugly-looking fellows, whom they cannot abide the sight of Many more want the old High land liberty, the convenient liberty of plundering. Many others there are who want the liberty of war, of borrowing their neighbours' wives or daughters; and not a few, though they do not always avow it, the liberty of murdering their Prince. 24. If you are a reasonable man, a man of real honour, and consequently want none of these, I beg to know what would you have? Considering the thing calmly, what liberty can you reasonably desire which you do not already enjoy? What is the matter with you, and with multitudes of the good people, both in England and Ireland, that they are crying and groaning as if they were chained to an oar, or barred up in the dungeons of the Inquisition? The plain. melancholy truth is this: There is a general infatuation, which spreads, like an overflowing stream, from one end of the land to the other; and a man must have great wisdom and great strength, or he will be carried away by the torrent. But how can we account for this epidemic madness? for it deserves no better name.