I
confess to you, Sir, I never liked this continual talk of resistance
and revolution, or the practice of making the extreme medicine of
the constitution its daily bread. It renders the habit of society
dangerously valetudinary; it is taking periodical doses of mercury
sublimate and swallowing down repeated provocatives of cantharides
to our love of liberty.
This distemper of remedy, grown habitual, relaxes and wears out,
by a vulgar and prostituted use, the spring of that spirit which is to
be exerted on great occasions. It was in the most patient period of
Roman servitude that themes of tyrannicide made the ordinary
exercise of boys at school- cum perimit saevos classis numerosa
tyrannos. In the ordinary state of things, it produces in a country
like ours the worst effects, even on the cause of that liberty which
it abuses with the dissoluteness of an extravagant speculation. Almost
all the high-bred republicans of my time have, after a short space,
become the most decided, thorough-paced courtiers; they soon left
the business of a tedious, moderate, but practical resistance to those
of us whom, in the pride and intoxication of their theories, they have
slighted as not much better than Tories. Hypocrisy, of course,
delights in the most sublime speculations, for, never intending to
go beyond speculation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent.
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