It should seem unjustifiable to endeavour, by penalties, to deter a man from calling himself by any name, or attiring himself or others, with their own consent, in any manner he thinks proper. Not that these things are, as they have sometimes been represented, in their own nature trivial. We have endeavoured to prove the reverse of this. They ought to be assailed with every weapon of argument and ridicule. in an enlightened community, the man who assumes to himself a pompous appellation will be considered as a fool or a madman. But fulminations and penalties are not the proper instruments to repress an ecstasy of this sort.
There is another circumstance necessary to be stated, by way of qualification to the preceding conclusion. Evils often exist in a community, which, though mere excrescences at first, at length become so incorporated with the principle of social existence that they cannot suddenly be separated without the risk of involving the most dreadful calamities. Feudal rights, and the privileges of rank, are, in themselves considered, entitled to no quarter.
The inequalities of property perhaps constituted a state through which it was at least necessary for us to pass, and which constituted the true original excitement to the unfolding the powers of the human mind.
But it would be difficult to show that feudality and aristocracy ever produced an overbalance of good. Yet, were they to be suddenly and instantly abolished, two evils would necessarily follow. First, the abrupt reduction of thousands to a condition the reverse of that to which they had hitherto been accustomed, a condition, perhaps the most auspicious to human talent and felicity, but for which habit had wholly unfitted them, and which would be to them a continual source of dejection and suffering. It may be doubted whether the genuine cause of reform ever demands that, in its name, we should sentence whole classes of men to wretchedness. Secondly, an attempt abruptly to abolish practices which had originally no apology to plead for their introduction would be attended with as dreadful convulsions, and as melancholy a series of public calamities, as an attack upon the first principles of society itself. All the reasonings therefore which were formerly adduced under the head of revolutions are applicable to the present case.