OUR Laws make a distinction between Vassalage and Obedience; between a devouring Prerogative, and a licentious ungovernable Freedom: and as of all the Orders of Building, the Composite is the best, so ours by a happy mixture and a wise choice of what is best in others, is brought into a Form that is our Felicity who live under it, and the envy of our Neighbour that cannot imitate it.
The Crown hath power sufficient to protect our Liberties. The People have so much Liberty as is necessary to make them useful to the Crown.* Our Government is in a just proportion, no Tympany,* no unnatural swelling either of Power or Liberty; and whereas in all overgrown Monarchies, Reason, Learning, and Enquiry are hang’d in Effigy for Mutineers;* here they are encouraged and cherished as the surest Friends to a Government establish’d upon the Foundation of Law and Justice.
* Depriving a people of their liberties does not make the public more serviceable to the State, but enervates and weakens them until the State itself cannot function. See John Stuart Mill on Losing Steam.
* In the medical sense of tympanites (tim-pan-eye-tees), a gaseous swelling of the abdomen, or in the sense of bombastic drum-beating on orchestral timpani, or quite possibly in both senses.
* That is, wherever Government power is too great, science and the arts are regarded as dangerous to the State, and carefully domesticated, censored or persecuted.