The liberty
of expression, with a great nation, would become like that in a
well-educated company, in which there is indeed freedom of speech, but
not of clamor; or like that in an orderly senate, in which men who
deserve to be heard, are heard in due time, and under determined
restrictions. The degree of liberty you can rightly grant to a number
of men is in the inverse ratio of their desire for it; and a general
hush, or call to order, would be often very desirable in this England of
ours. For the rest, of any good or evil extent, it is impossible to say
what measure is owing to restraint, and what to license where the right
is balanced between them. I was not a little provoked one day, a summer
or two since, in Scotland, because the Duke of Athol hindered me from
examining the gneiss and slate junctions in Glen Tilt, at the hour
convenient to me; but I saw them at last, and in quietness; and to the
very restriction that annoyed me, owed, probably, the fact of their being
in existence, instead of being blasted away by a mob-company; while the
"free" paths and inlets of Loch Katrine and the Lake of Geneva are
forever trampled down and destroyed, not by one duke, but by tens of
thousands of ignorant tyrants.
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