licentiousness, indeed, is not only dangerous to liberty, but it is actually a present infringement of it in many instances. But I must not turn this good day into a day of reproach. Dropping, then, the encroachments which are made upon our liberty, peace, and quiet, by licentiousness, we are certainly a freer nation than any other we have an account of; and as free, it seems, as the very nature of government will permit. Every man is equally under the protection of the laws; may have equal justice against the most rich and powerful; and securely enjoy all the common blessings of life, with which the industry of his ancestors, or his own, has furnished him. In some other countries the upper part of the world is free; but in Great Britain the whole body of the people is free. For we have at length, to the distinguished honour of those who began, and have more particularly laboured in it, emancipated our northern provinces from most of their legal remains of slavery; for voluntary slavery cannot be abolished, at least not directly, by law. I take leave to speak of this long-desired work as done; since it wants only his concurrence, who, as we have found by many years' experience, considers the good of his people as his own. And I cannot but look upon these acts of the legislature, in a further view, as instances of regard to posterity, and declarations of its readiness to put every subject upon an equal footing of security and freedom, if any of them are not so, in any other respects, which come into its view; and as a precedent and example for doing it.
Liberty, which is the very genius of our civil constitution, and runs through every branch of it, extends its influence to the ecclesiastical part of it. A religious establishment, without a toleration of such as think they cannot, in conscience, conform to it, is itself a general tyranny; because it claims absolute authority over conscience, and would soon beget particular kinds of tyranny of the worst sort, tyranny over the mind, and various superstitions, after the way should be paved for them, as it soon must by ignorance.
