ful to his friends. Particular care must be taken after he has begun to
cool and calculate his chances of security, 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.