They see no merit or demerit in any man, or any action, or
any political principle, any further than as they may forward or retard
their design of change; they therefore take up, one day, the most
violent and stretched prerogative, and another time the wildest
democratic ideas of freedom, and pass from the one to the other without
any sort of regard to cause, to person, or to party.
In France you are now in the crisis of a revolution, and in the transit
from one form of government to another: you cannot see that character of
men exactly in the same situation in which we see it in this country.
With us it is militant, with you it is triumphant; and you know how it
can act, when its power is commensurate to its will. I would not be
supposed to confine those observations to any description of men, or to
comprehend all men of any description within them,--no, far from it! I
am as incapable of that injustice as I am of keeping terms with those
who profess principles of extremes, and who, under the name of religion,
teach little else than wild and dangerous politics. The worst of these
politics of revolution is this: they temper and harden the breast, in
order to prepare it for the desperate strokes which are sometimes used
in extreme occasions. But as these occasions may never arrive, the mind
receives a gratuitous taint; and the moral sentiments suffer not a
little, when no political purpose is served by the depravation.
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