self full of
virtue and full of force. It was to invite partisans, by making it
appear to the world that a generous cause was to be asserted, one fit
for a generous people to engage in. From passive submission was it to
expect resolute defence? No! It must have warm advocates and passionate
defenders, which an heavy, discontented acquiescence never could
produce. What a base and foolish thing is it for any consolidated body
of authority to say, or to act as if it said, "I will put my trust, not
in my own virtue, but in your patience; I will indulge in effeminacy, in
indolence, in corruption; I will give way to all my perverse and vicious
humors, because you cannot punish me without the hazard of ruining
yourselves."

I wished to warn the people against the greatest of all evils,--a blind
and furious spirit of innovation, under the name of reform. I was,
indeed, well aware that power rarely reforms itself. So it is,
undoubtedly, when all is quiet about it. But I was in hopes that
provident fear might prevent fruitless penitence. I trusted that danger
might produce at least circumspection. I flattered myself, in a moment
like this, that nothing would be added to make authority
top-heavy,--that the very moment of an earthquake would not be the time
chosen for adding a story to our houses. I hoped to see the surest of
all reforms, perhaps the only sure reform,--the ceasing to do ill. In
the mean time I wished to the people the wisdom of knowing how to
tolerate a condition which none of their efforts can render much more
than tolerable. It was a condition, however, in which everything was to
be found that could enable them to live to Nature, and, if so they
pleased, to live to virtue and to honor.

I do not repent that I thought better of those to whom I wished well
than they will suffer me long to think that they deserved. Far from
repenting, I would to God that new faculties had been called up in me,
in favor not of this or that man, or this or that system, but of the
general, vital principle, that, whilst it was in its vigor, produced the
state of things transmitted to us from our fathers, but which, through
the joint operation of the abuses of authority and liberty, may perish
in our hands. I am not of opinion that the race of men, and the
commonwealths they create, like the bodies of individuals, grow effete
and languid and bloodless, and ossify, by the necessities of their own
conformation, and the fatal operation of