I shall not live to behold the unravelling of the intricate plot which
saddens and perplexes the awful drama of Providence now acting on the
moral theatre of the world. Whether for thought or for action, I am at
the end of my career. You are in the middle of yours. In what part of
its orbit the nation, with which we are carried along, moves at this
instant, it is not easy to conjecture. It may, perhaps, be far advanced
in its aphelion.--But when to return?
Not to lose ourselves in the infinite void of the conjectural world, our
business is with what is likely to be affected, for the better or the
worse, by the wisdom or weakness of our plans. In all speculations upon
men and human affairs, it is of no small moment to distinguish things of
accident from permanent causes, and from effects that cannot be altered.
It is not every irregularity in our movement that is a total deviation
from our course. I am not quite of the mind of those speculators who
seem assured that, necessarily, and by the constitution of things, all
states have the same periods of infancy, manhood, and decrepitude that
are found in the individuals who compose them. Parallels of this sort
rather furnish similitudes to illustrate or to adorn, than supply
analogies from whence to reason. The objects which are attempted to be
forced into an analogy are not found in the same classes of existence.
Individuals are physical beings subject to laws universal and
invariable. The immediate cause acting in these laws may be obscure; the
general results are subjects of certain calculation. But commonwealths
are not physical but moral essences. They are artificial combinations,
and, in their proximate efficient cause, the arbitrary productions
of the human mind. We are not yet acquainted with the laws which
necessarily influence the stability of that kind of work made by that
kind of agent. There is not in the physical order (with which they do
not appear to hold any assignable connection) a distinct cause by which
any of those fabrics must necessarily grow, flourish, or decay; nor, in
my opinion, does the moral world produce anything more determinate on
that subject than what may serve as an amusement (liberal, indeed, and
ingenious, but still only an amusement) for speculative men. I doubt
whether the history of mankind is yet complete enough, if ever it can
be so, to furnish grounds for a sure theory on the internal causes which
necessarily affect the fortune of a state. I am far from denying the
operation of such causes: but they are infinitely uncertain and much
more obscure, and much more difficult to trace, than the foreign causes
that tend to raise, to depress, and sometimes to overwhelm, a community.
It is often impossible in these political inquiries to find any
proportion between the apparent force of any moral causes we may assign
and their known operation. We are therefore obliged to deliver up that
operation to mere chance, or, more piously (perhaps, more rationally),
to the occasional interposition and irresistible hand of the Great
Disposer. We have seen states of considerable duration, which for ages
have remained nearly as they have begun, and could hardly be said to ebb
or flow. Some appear to have spent their vigour at their commencement.
Some have blazed out in their glory a little before their extinction.
The meridian of some has been the most splendid. Others, and they the
greatest number, have fluctuated, and experienced at different periods
of their existence a great variety of fortune. At the very moment when
some of them seemed plunged in unfathomable abysses of disgrace and
disaster, they have suddenly emerged. They have begun a new course and
opened a new reckoning; and, even in the depths of their calamity,
and on the very ruins of their country, have laid the foundations of
a towering and durable greatness. All this has happened without any
apparent previous change in the general circumstances which had brought
on their distress. The death of a man at a critical juncture, his
disgust, his retreat, his disgrace, have brought innumerable calamities
on a whole nation. A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an
inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of nature.
Such, and often influenced by such causes, has commonly been the fate of
monarchies of long duration. They have their ebbs and their flows. This
has been eminently the fate of the monarchy of France. There have been
times in which no power has ever been brought so low. Few have ever
flourished in greater glory. By turns elevated and depressed, that power
had been, on the whole, rather on the increase; and it continued not
only powerful but formidable to the hour of the total ruin of the
monarchy. This fall of the monarchy was far from being preceded by any
exterior symptoms of decline. The interior were not visible to every
eye; and a thousand accidents might have prevented the operation of what
the most clear-sighted were not able to discern, nor the most provident
to divine. A very little time before its dreadful catastrophe there
was a kind of exterior splendour in the situation of the Crown, which
usually adds to government strength and authority at home. The Crown
seemed then to have obtained some of the most splendid objects of state
ambition. None of the continental powers of Europe were the enemies
of France. They were all either tacitly disposed to her, or publicly
connected with her; and in those who kept the most aloof there was
little appearance of jealousy; of animosity there was no appearance
at all. The British nation, her great preponderating rival; she had
humbled; to all appearance she had weakened; certainly had endangered,
by cutting off a very large, and by far the most growing part of her
empire. In that its acme of human prosperity and greatness, in the high
and palmy state of the monarchy of France, it fell to the ground without
a struggle. It fell without any of those vices in the monarch which have
sometimes been the causes of the fall of kingdoms, but which existed,
without any visible effect on the state, in the highest degree in many
other princes; and, far from destroying their power, had only left some
slight stains on their character. The financial difficulties were only
pretexts and instruments of those who accomplished the ruin of that
monarchy. They were not the causes of it.
Deprived of the old government, deprived in a manner of all government,
France, fallen as a monarchy, to common speculators might have appeared
more likely to be an object of pity or insult, according to the
disposition of the circumjacent powers, than to be the scourge and
terror of them all: but out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in
France has arisen a vast, tremendous unformed spectre, in a far more
terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination
and subdued the fortitude of man. Going straight forward to its end,
unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising all common maxims
and all common means, that hideous phantom overpowered those who could
not believe it was possible she could at all exist, except on the
principles which habit rather than nature had persuaded them were
necessary to their own particular welfare, and to their own ordinary
modes of action. But the constitution of any political being, as well as
that of any physical being, ought to be known, before one can venture to
say what is fit for its conservation, or what is the proper means of its
power. The poison of other states is the food of the new republic. That
bankruptcy, the very apprehension of which is one of the causes assigned
for the fall of the monarchy, was the capital on which she opened her
traffic with the world.