I pretend not by this reasoning to exclude all possibility of contriving a register for seamen, which might man the Navy without being dangerous to liberty. I only observe that no satisfactory scheme of that nature has yet been proposed. Rather than adopt any project hitherto invented, we continue a practice seemingly the most absurd and unaccountable. Authority, in times of full internal peace and concord, is armed against law. A continued and open usurpation of the crown is permitted amidst the greatest jealousy and watchfulness in the people; nay, proceeding from those very principles, liberty, in a country of the highest liberty, is left entirely to its own defence without any countenance or protection; the wild state of nature is renewed in one of the most civilized societies of mankind; and great violences and disorders among the people, the most human and the best-natured, are committed with impunity; while the one party pleads obedience to the supreme magistrate, the other the sanction of fundamental laws. NOTES, OF SOME REMARKABLE CUSTOMS. [34] His harangue for it is still extant: περι Συμμοριας. [35] Plutarchus in _vita decem oratorum_. Demosthenes gives a different account of this law. (_Contra Aristogiton, Orat. II._) He says that its purport was to render the ατιμοι επιτιμοι, or to restore the privilege of bearing offices to those who had been declared incapable. Perhaps these were both clauses of the same law. [36] The senate of the Bean was only a less numerous mob chosen by lot from among the people, and their authority was not great. [37] _In Ctesiphontem._ It is remarkable that the first step after the dissolution of the Democracy by Critias and the Thirty was to annul the γραφη παρανομων, as we learn from Demosthenes κατα Τιμοκ. The orator in this oration gives us the words of the law establishing the γραφη παρανομων, p. 297, _ex edit._ _Aldi_. And he accounts for it from the same principles we here reason upon. [38] Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour, part 3, § 2. OF THE POPULOUSNESS OF ANCIENT NATIONS.​[39]