Yes; very confidently. Such transgression is a feudal barbarism. The feudal system has died out in theory; and it is impossible that its practical barbarism should long remain. The progress of freedom has been continuous and accountable, and its consummation is clearly a matter of confident prophecy. Sovereigns, grand and pretty, individual or consisting of a small number compacted into a government, have first exercised absolute power over the lives, properties and liberties of their subjects: this despotic grasp has been gradually relaxed, till life, property, and liberty have been made to depend on law, and not on arbitrary will. Next, the law has been improved, from being the agent of such arbitrary will, to being the expression of a more extended and abstract will. From this stage of improvement the progress has been regular. The province of rule has been narrowed, and that of law has been enlarged. Whatever may have been,—whatever may still be,—the faults in the methods of making the law, the absurdities of the law in some of its parts, and its inadequateness as a whole in every civilized country, the process of enlargement has still gone on, some unjust usurpation being abolished, some sore oppression removed from time to time, affording a clear prospect of a period when every natural and social right shall be released from the gripe of irresponsible authority. No king now strikes off heads at any moment when the fancy may seize him. No kings’ councillors now plunder their neighbours to carry on their wars or their sports, or are paid for their services by gifts of patents and monopolies. No parliaments now make laws according to the royal pleasure, without consulting the people; and, if they are slow to repeal some oppressive old laws with which the people are disgusted, it is certain that such laws could not at this day be proposed. What can be more eloquent than this language of events? What more prophetic than this progression? While the agents by which the advance has been achieved are multiplied and strengthened,—while its final purposes are more clearly revealed, day by day, what other expectation can be entertained than that it will advance more and more rapidly, till the meanest rights of industry shall be at length freed from the last aggressions of power? Then the humblest labourer may buy his loaf and sell his labour in what corner of the earth he pleases. Then legislators will no more dream of dictating what wine shall be drunk, and what fabrics shall be worn, and through what medium God’s free gifts must be sought, than they now dream of branding a man’s face on account of his theology. They will perceive that the office of dispensing the bounty of nature is not theirs but God’s; and that the agents he has appointed are neither kings, parliaments, nor custom-house officers, but those ever-growing desires with which he has vivified the souls of the haughtiest and the lowliest of his children.