"We will gratify the love of insolence and power; we will enjoy the old orthodox sport of witnessing the impotent anger of men compelled to submit to civil degradation, or to sacrifice their notions of truth to ours. And all this we may do without the slightest risk, because their numbers are (as yet) not very considerable. Cruelty and injustice must, of course, exist: but why connect them with danger? Why torture a bull-dog, when you can get a frog or a rabbit? I am sure my proposal will meet with the most universal approbation. Do not be apprehensive of any opposition from Ministers. If it is a case of hatred, we are sure that one man[155] will defend it by the Gospel: if it abridges human freedom, we know that another[156] will find precedents for it in the Revolution." As years went on, he was sometimes displeased by the doings of his Liberal friends, but he was never "stricken by the palsy of candour"; he never forsook the good cause for which he had fought so steadily, never made terms with political deserters. After the Conservative triumph of 1841 he wrote:--"The country is in a state of political transition, and the shabby are preparing their consciences and opinions for a tack." But, though he was so keen and so consistent a champion of civil and religious freedom, he was a sworn foe to anarchy and licence. Like most people who had seen the later stages of the French Revolution, he had a holy horror of mob-law and mob-justice. "If I am to be a slave," he said, "I would rather be the slave of a king than of a rabble"; but he vehemently objected to being the slave of either. He likened Democracy and Despotism to the "two tubes of a double-barrelled pistol," which menaced the life of the State. "The democrats are as much to be kept at bay with the left hand as the Tories are with the right." "A thousand years," he wrote in 1838, "have scarce sufficed to make our blessed England what it is: an hour may lay it in the dust." After the riots at Bristol in 1831, consequent on the rejection of the Reform Bill, he strenuously demanded stern punishment for the rioters. He wrote to the Prime Minister:-- "Pray do not be good-natured about Bristol. I must have ten people hanged, and twenty transported, and thirty imprisoned; it is absolutely necessary to give the multitude a severe blow, for their conduct at Bristol has been most atrocious. You will save lives by it in the end. There is no plea of want, as there was in the agricultural riots." _You will save lives by it in the end._ There spoke the truly humanitarian spirit which does not shrink from drawing the sword at the bidding of real necessity, but asks itself once and again whether any proposed effusion of blood is really demanded by the exigencies of the moral law.