Other great states, having been without any regular, certain course of
elevation or decline, we may hope that the British fortune may fluctuate
also; because the public mind, which greatly influences that fortune,
may have its changes. We are therefore never authorised to abandon our
country to its fate, or to act or advise as if it had no resource. There
is no reason to apprehend, because ordinary means threaten to fail, that
no others can spring up. Whilst our heart is whole, it will find means,
or make them. The heart of the citizen is a perennial spring of energy
to the state. Because the pulse seems to intermit, we must not presume
that it will cease instantly to beat. The public must never be regarded
as incurable. I remember in the beginning of what has lately been called
the Seven Years' War, that an eloquent writer and ingenious speculator,
Dr. Brown, upon some reverses which happened in the beginning of that
war, published an elaborate philosophical discourse to prove that the
distinguishing features of the people of England have been totally
changed, and that a frivolous effeminacy was become the national
character. Nothing could be more popular than that work. It was thought
a great consolation to us, the light people of this country (who were
and are light, but who were not and are not effeminate), that we had
found the causes of our misfortunes in our vices. Pythagoras could not
be more pleased with his leading discovery. But whilst in that splenetic
mood we amused ourselves in a sour, critical speculation, of which we
were ourselves the objects, and in which every man lost his particular
sense of the public disgrace in the epidemic nature of the distemper;
whilst, as in the Alps, goitre ["i" circumflex] kept goitre ["i" acute]
in countenance; whilst we were thus abandoning ourselves to a direct
confession of our inferiority to France, and whilst many, very many,
were ready to act upon a sense of that inferiority, a few months
effected a total change in our variable minds. We emerged from the gulf
of that speculative despondency, and were buoyed up to the highest point
of practical vigour. Never did the masculine spirit of England display
itself with more energy, nor ever did its genius soar with a prouder
pre-eminence over France, than at the time when frivolity and effeminacy
had been at least tacitly acknowledged as their national character by
the good people of this kingdom.