ng be worse than
that? Yes, sir, I _might break hers_!"

His fable, too, of the caterpillar and the horseman was conceived in
arrogance, but it was pretty and effective. Every tory intellect on
earth is pleased to discourse in that way of the labors of the only
men who greatly help their species,--the patient elaborators of truth.
A caterpillar, as we learn from this fable, had crawled slowly over a
fence, which a gallant horseman took at a single leap. "Stop," says
the caterpillar,

"you are too flighty; you want connection and continuity; it
took me an hour to get over; you can't be as sure as I am
that you have really overcome the difficulty, and are indeed
over the fence."

To which, of course, the gallant horseman makes the expected
contemptuous reply. This is precisely in the spirit of Carlyle's
sneers at the political economists,--the men who are not content to
sit down and howl in this wilderness of a modern world, but bestir
themselves to discover methods by which it can be made less a
wilderness.

There is so much truth in the doctrines of the original States' Rights
party,--the party of Jefferson, Madison, and Patrick Henry,--that a
very commonplace man, who learned his politics in that school, is able
to make a respectable figure in the public counsels. The mere notion
that government, being a necessary evil, is to be reduced to the
minimum that will answer the purposes of government, saves from many
false steps. The doctrine that the central government is to confine
itself to the duties assigned it in the Constitution, is a guiding
principle suited to the limited human mind. A vast number of claims,
suggestions, and petitions are excluded by it even from consideration.
If an eloquent Hamiltonian proposes to appropriate the public money
for the purpose of enabling American manufacturers to exhibit their
products at a Paris Exhibition, the plainest country member of the
Jeffersonian school perceives at once the inconsistency of such a
proposition with the fundamental principle of his political creed. He
has a compass to steer by, and a port to sail to, instead of being
afloat on the waste of waters, the sport of every breeze that blows.
It is touching to observe that this unhappy, sick, and sometimes mad
John Randolph, amid all the vagaries of his later life, had always a
vein of soundness in him, derived from his early connection with the
enlightened men who acted in politics w