In
vain shall a man look to the possibility of making such things when he
wants them. The winds blow as they list. These institutions are the
products of enthusiasm; they are the instruments of wisdom. Wisdom
cannot create materials; they are the gifts of nature or of chance;
her pride is in the use. The perennial existence of bodies corporate
and their fortunes are things particularly suited to a man who has
long views; who meditates designs that require time in fashioning, and
which propose duration when they are accomplished. He is not deserving
to rank high, or even to be mentioned in the order of great statesmen,
who, having obtained the command and direction of such a power as
existed in the wealth, the discipline, and the habits of such
corporations, as those which you have rashly destroyed, cannot find
any way of converting it to the great and lasting benefit of his
country. On the view of this subject, a thousand uses suggest
themselves to a contriving mind. To destroy any power growing wild
from the rank productive force of the human mind is almost tantamount,
in the moral world, to the destruction of the apparently active
properties of bodies in the material. It would be like the attempt
to destroy (if it were in our competence to destroy) the expansive
force of fixed air in nitre, or the power of steam, or of electricity,
or of magnetism.
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