We have a vast interest to preserve, and we possess great means of
preserving it: but it is to be remembered that the artificer may be
encumbered by his tools, and that resources may be among impediments.
If wealth is the obedient and laborious slave of virtue and of public
honour, then wealth is in its place, and has its use: but if this
order is changed, and honour is to be sacrificed to the conservation of
riches,--riches, which have neither eyes nor hands, nor anything truly
vital in them, cannot long survive the being of their vivifying powers,
their legitimate masters, and their potent protectors. If we command our
wealth, we shall be rich and free: if our wealth command us, we are
poor indeed. We are bought by the enemy with the treasure from our own
coffers. Too great a sense of the value of a subordinate interest may be
the very source of its danger, as well as the certain ruin of interests
of a superior order. Often has a man lost his all because he would not
submit to hazard all in defending it. A display of our wealth before
robbers is not the way to restrain their boldness, or to lessen their
rapacity. This display is made, I know, to persuade the people of
England that thereby we shall awe the enemy, and improve the terms
of our capitulation: it is made, not that we should fight with more
animation, but that we should supplicate with better hopes. We are
mistaken. We have an enemy to deal with who never regarded our contest
as a measuring and weighing of purses. He is the Gaul that puts his
SWORD into the scale. He is more tempted with our wealth as booty, than
terrified with it as power. But let us be rich or poor, let us be either
in what proportion we may, nature is false or this is true, that where
the essential public force (of which money is but a part) is in any
degree upon a par in a conflict between nations, that state, which is
resolved to hazard its existence rather than to abandon its objects,
must have an infinite advantage over that which is resolved to yield
rather than to carry its resistance beyond a certain point. Humanly
speaking, that people which bounds its efforts only with its being, must
give the law to that nation which will not push its opposition beyond
its convenience.