urity, that he do not
gather to him a curtain of volunteers and go to sleep again behind them;
for they cost little in proportion to the much they pretend to be to
him. Patriotic taxpayers doubtless exist: prophetic ones, provident
ones, do not. At least we show that we are wanting in them. The taxpayer
of a free land taxes himself, and his disinclination for the bitter
task, save under circumstances of screaming urgency--as when the
night-gear and bed-linen of old convulsed Panic are like the churned
Channel sea in the track of two hundred hostile steamboats, let
me say--is of the kind the gentle schoolboy feels when death or
an expedition has relieved him of his tyrant, and he is entreated
notwithstanding to go to his books.

Will you not own that the working of the system for scaring him and
bleeding is very ingenious? But whether the ingenuity comes of native
sagacity, as it is averred by some, or whether it shows an instinct
labouring to supply the deficiencies of stupidity, according to others,
I cannot express an opinion. I give you the position of the country
undisturbed by any moralizings of mine. The youth I introduce to you
will rarely let us escape from it; for the reason that he was born with
so extreme and passionate a love for his country, that he thought all
things else of mean importance in comparison: and our union is one in
which, following the counsel of a sage and seer, I must try to paint for
you what is, not that which I imagine. This day, this hour, this life,
and even politics, the centre and throbbing heart of it (enough, when
unburlesqued, to blow the down off the gossamer-stump of fiction at a
single breath, I have heard tell), must be treated of men, and the
ideas of men, which are--it is policy to be emphatic upon truisms--are
actually the motives of men in a greater degree than their appetites:
these are my theme; and may it be my fortune to keep them at bloodheat,
and myself calm as a statue of Memnon in prostrate Egypt! He sits there
waiting for the sunlight; I here, and readier to be musical than you
think. I can at any rate be impartial; and do but fix your eyes on the
sunlight striking him and swallowing the day in rounding him, and you
have an image of the passive receptivity of shine and shade I hold
it good to aim at, if at the same time I may keep my characters at
blood-heat. I shoot my arrows at a mark that is pretty certain to
return them to me. And as to perfect success, I shou