Percy Bysshe Shelley, from An Address to the People on the Death of Princess Charlotte (1817)
Transcribed from page 81 of Volume VI of the 1965 Gordian edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Complete Works, edited by Roger Ingpen and Walter E. Peck. Shelley composed the Address in 1817.
....It is a national calamity, that we endure men to rule over us, who sanction for whatever ends a conspiracy which is to arrive at its purpose through such a frightful pouring forth of human blood and agony. But when that purpose is to trample upon our rights and liberties for ever, to present to us the alternatives of anarchy and oppression, and triumph when the astonished nation accepts the latter at their hands, to maintain a vast standing army, and add, year by year to a public debt, which, already, they know, cannot be discharged; and which, when the delusion that supports it fails, will produce as much misery and confusion through all classes of society as it has continued to produce of famine and degradation to the undefended poor; to imprison and caluminate those who may offend them, at will; when this, if not the purpose, is the effect of that conspiracy, how ought we not to mourn?
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