utility to others, and without dignity to itself; because they
aim at obtaining the dues of labor without industry, and by frauds would
draw from the compassion of others what men ought to owe to their own
spirit and their own exertions.

I am thoroughly satisfied, that, if we degrade ourselves, it is the
degradation which will subject us to the yoke of necessity, and not that
it is necessity which has brought on our degradation. In this same
chaos, where light and darkness are struggling together, the open
subscription of last year, with all its circumstances, must have given
us no little glimmering of hope: not (as I have heard it was vainly
discoursed) that the loan could prove a crutch to a lame negotiation
abroad, and that the whiff and wind of it must at once have disposed the
enemies of all tranquillity to a desire for peace. Judging on the face
of facts, if on them it had any effect at all, it had the direct
contrary effect; for very soon after the loan became public at Paris,
the negotiation ended, and our ambassador was ignominiously expelled. My
view of this was different: I liked the loan, not from the influence
which it might have on the enemy, but on account of the temper which it
indicated in our own people. This alone is a consideration of any
importance; because all calculation formed upon a supposed relation of
the habitudes of others to our own, under the present circumstances, is
weak and fallacious. The adversary must be judged, not by what we are,
or by what we wish him to be, but by what we must know he actually is:
unless we choose to shut our eyes and our ears to the uniform tenor of
all his discourses, and to his uniform course in all his actions. We may
be deluded; but we cannot pretend that we have been disappointed. The
old rule of _Ne te quaesiveris extra_ is a precept as available in policy
as it is in morals. Let us leave off speculating upon the disposition
and the wants of the enemy. Let us descend into our own bosoms; let us
ask ourselves what are our duties, and what are our means of discharging
them. In what heart are you at home? How far may an English minister
confide in the affections, in the confidence, in the force of an English
people? What does he find us, when he puts us to the proof of what
English interest and English honor demand? It is as furnishing an answer
to these questions that I consider the circumstances of the loan. The
effect on the enemy is not in what he may spe