being less free; but a community cannot, since the licentiousness of one will unavoidably break in upon the liberty of another. Civil liberty, the liberty of a community, is a severe and a restrained thing; implies in the notion of it, authority, settled subordinations, subjection, and obedience; and is altogether as much hurt by too little of this kind as by too much of it And the love of liberty, when it is indeed the love of liberty which carries us to withstand tyranny, will as much carry us to reverence authority and support it; for the most obvious reason, that one is as necessary to the very being of liberty, as the other is destructive of it. And therefore the love of liberty, which does not produce this effect—the love of liberty, which is not a real principle of dutiful behaviour towards authority—is as hypocritical as the religion which is not productive of a good life. Licentiousness is, in truth, such an excess of liberty, as is of the same nature with tyranny. For, what is the difference between them, but that one is lawless power exercised under pretence of authority, or by persons invested with it; the other, lawless power exercised under pretence of liberty, or without any pretence at all? A people, then, must always be less free, in proportion as they are more licentious; licentiousness being not only different from liberty, but directly contrary to it—a direct breach upon it.
It is moreover of a growing nature, and of speedy growth too; and, with the culture which it has amongst us, needs no great length of time to get to such a height as no legal government will be able to restrain, or subsist under; which is the condition the historian describes, in saying they could neither bear their vices, nor the remedies of them.[1] I said legal government; for, in the present state of the world, there is no danger of our becoming savages. Had licentiousness finished its work, and destroyed our con-
- ↑ Nec vitia nostra, nec remedia pati possumus. Liv. li. c. l.
