ot at all what we should have
expected from our old ideas even of the faults and vices of the English
character. The disastrous events which have followed one upon another in
a long, unbroken, funereal train, moving in a procession that seemed to
have no end,--these were not the principal causes of our dejection. We
feared more from what threatened to fail within than what menaced to
oppress us from abroad. To a people who have once been proud and great,
and great because they were proud, a change in the national spirit is
the most terrible of all revolutions.

I shall not live to behold the unravelling of the intricate plot which
saddens and perplexes the awful drama of Providence now acting on the
moral theatre of the world. Whether for thought or for action, I am at
the end of my career. You are in the middle of yours. In what part of
its orbit the nation with which we are carried along moves at this
instant it is not easy to conjecture. It may, perhaps, be far advanced
in its aphelion,--but when to return?

Not to lose ourselves in the infinite void of the conjectural world, our
business is with what is likely to be affected, for the better or the
worse, by the wisdom or weakness of our plans. In all speculations upon
men and human affairs, it is of no small moment to distinguish things of
accident from permanent causes, and from effects that cannot be altered.
It is not every irregularity in our movement that is a total deviation
from our course. I am not quite of the mind of those speculators who
seem assured that necessarily, and by the constitution of things, all
states have the same periods of infancy, manhood, and decrepitude that
are found in the individuals who compose them. Parallels of this sort
rather furnish similitudes to illustrate or to adorn than supply
analogies from whence to reason. The objects which are attempted to be
forced into an analogy are not found in the same classes of existence.
Individuals are physical beings, subject to laws universal and
invariable. The immediate cause acting in these laws may be obscure: the
general results are subjects of certain calculation. But commonwealths
are not physical, but moral essences. They are artificial combinations,
and, in their proximate efficient cause, the arbitrary productions of
the human mind. We are not yet acquainted with the laws which
necessarily influence the stability of that kind of work made by that
kind of agent. There is not in the