* * * * *
The kind of anniversary sermons to which a great part of what I write
refers, if men are not shamed out of their present course, in
commemorating the fact, will cheat many out of the principles and
deprive them of the benefits of the Revolution they commemorate. 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.
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