If it be ask'd, how the distinction's known, Oppression marks him out--the nations groan, The broken laws, the cries of injur'd blood, Are languages by all men understood! * * Tyrants lose all respect for humanity, in proportion as they are sunk beneath it; taught to believe themselves of a different species, they really become so; lose their participation with their kind; and, in mimicking the God, dwindle into the brute! Blind with prejudices as a mole, stung with truth as with scorpions, sore all over with wounded pride like a boil, their minds a heap of morbid proud flesh and bloated humours, a disease and gan-grene in the state, instead of its life-blood and vital principle-- foreign despots claim mankind as their property. They regard men crawling on the face of the earth as we do insects that cross our path, and survey the common drama of human life as a fantoccini exhibition got up for tlieir amusement. It is the over-weening, aggravated, intolerable sense of swelling pride and ungovernable self-will that so often drives them mad; as it is their blind fatuity and insensibility to all beyond themselves, that, transmitted through successive generations, and confirmed by regal intermarriages, in time makes them idiots. Hazlitt's Political Essays, p. 341. {087} Just laws and liberty make patriot kings; Tyrants and tyranny are self-made things. * * Though a Despot be transformed into a limited king, he is in heart and purpose still a despot. He feels duress; he is not at liberty to oppress at his pleasare; and he awaits an opportnnity to exercise 'the Right Divine of Kings to govern wrong;' for he holds the doctrine that "oaths are not to be kept with subjects." In the reign of Richard II. the Duke of Norfolk apprised the Duke of Hereford, that the King purposed their destruction:-- Hereford.--God forbid!--He has sworn by St. Edward, to be a good Lord to me and the others. Norfolk.-- So has he often sworn to me by God's Body: but I do not trust him the more for that! Every restored despot has become an unblushing and shameless perjurer; where is there in history an instance to the con- trary?--Once a Despot, and always a Despot.