eigning divisions, and it threatens
every moment to predominate. For the present, however, the dread of
their fury forms some sort of security to their fellows, who now
exercise a more regular and therefore a somewhat less ferocious tyranny.
Most of the slaves choose a quiet, however reluctant, submission to
those who are somewhat satiated with blood, and who, like wolves, are a
little more tame from being a little less hungry, in preference to an
irruption of the famished devourers who are prowling and howling about
the fold.

This circumstance assures some degree of permanence to the power of
those whom we know to be permanently our rancorous and implacable
enemies. But to those very enemies who have sworn our destruction we
have ourselves given a further and far better security, by rendering the
cause of the royalists desperate. Those brave and virtuous, but
unfortunate adherents to the ancient Constitution of their country,
after the miserable slaughters which have been made in that body, after
all their losses by emigration, are still numerous, but unable to exert
themselves against the force of the usurpation evidently countenanced
and upheld by those very princes who had called them to arm for the
support of the legal monarchy. Where, then, after chasing these fleeting
hopes of ours from point to point of the political horizon, are they at
last really found? Not where, under Providence, the hopes of Englishmen
used to be placed, in our own courage and in our own virtues, but in the
moderation and virtue of the most atrocious monsters that have ever
disgraced and plagued mankind.

The only excuse to be made for all our mendicant diplomacy is the same
as in the case of all other mendicancy, namely, that it has been founded
on absolute necessity. This deserves consideration. Necessity, as it has
no law, so it has no shame. But moral necessity is not like
metaphysical, or even physical. In that category it is a word of loose
signification, and conveys different ideas to different minds. To the
low-minded, the slightest necessity becomes an invincible necessity.
"The slothful man saith, There is a lion in the way, and I shall be
devoured in the streets." But when the necessity pleaded is not in the
nature of things, but in the vices of him who alleges it, the whining
tones of commonplace beggarly rhetoric produce nothing but indignation:
because they indicate a desire of keeping up a dishonorable existence,
without