of the Court, were the causes and the only causes of that
great event. If the finances of that country had been in order, the
nobles moderate, the poor unoppressed, and any public spirit in the
Government, Voltaire, and Helvetius, and Rousseau, might have racked
their brains for thought, and written themselves blind, before they would
have raised a single arm, or even excited a single voice to exclaim for
change. A perfect freedom of the press would, indeed, have prevented the
causes which roused the people to assert themselves; but the causes once
in existence, all the writers in the world could not one moment have
either retarded the revolution or accelerated it. It is not the
representations of a political writer that can alter the nature of
things. Whose ingenuity, and wit, and eloquence, will persuade me that I
am cold when I am warm; that I am hungry when I am full; a slave when I
am free; and miserable, when I feel myself happy? While such is my
state, what writings would drive me into insurrection? And if the
contrary is my condition, what stimulus could I want to free myself from
it? What persuasions could possibly even delay my utmost efforts for a
change? It is not by the prosecution of political libels that the
stability of a government and domestic peace is ever secured. No; let
the Government pursue its only end, the public good, and let every man,
or at least a large majority, have more or less an interest in the
preservation of the State, and then all the writers in the country, from
the highest down to the obscurest corners of Grub-Street, may wear their
fingers to the roots of the nails with their pens, before they will work
the slightest discontent in the public or change in the government.
Nothing, gentlemen, is more common with writers and speakers, than to
discourse of states by figures drawn from the government of a ship; and I
will tell you what I once heard from a friend of mine who has served his
country in our navy, and which at the time most forcibly struck my mind.
"When I was stationed in the Mediterranean (he said, speaking of the
occurrences of his professional experience) we made captures of the
vessels of all countries except the Greeks, but we never captured them;
for they were always vigilant, active, and brave. We never surprised
them; if we chased them, they escaped us; and if we attempted to cut them
from the shelter to which we had driven them, we were repulsed." What
cre