This
method turns their understanding from the object before them, and
from the present exigencies of the world, to comparisons with former
times, of which, after all, we can know very little, and very
imperfectly; and our guides, the historians, who are to give us their
true interpretation, are often prejudiced, often ignorant, often
fonder of system than of truth. Whereas, if a man with reasonably
good parts and natural sagacity, and not in the leading-strings of
any master, will look steadily on the business before him, without
being diverted by retrospect and comparison, he may be capable of
forming a reasonably good judgment of what is to be done. There are
some fundamental points in which nature never changes--but they are
few and obvious, and belong rather to morals than to politics. But so
far as regards political matter, the human mind and human affairs are
susceptible of infinite modifications, and of combinations wholly new
and unlooked for. Very few, for instance, could have imagined that
property, which has been taken for natural dominion, should, through
the whole of a vast kingdom, lose all its importance and even its
influence. This is what history or books of speculation could hardly
have taught us. How many could have thought, that the most complete
and formidable revolution in a great empire should be made by men of
letters, not as subordinate instruments and trumpeters of sedition,
but as the chief contrivers and managers, and in a short time as the
open administrators and sovereign rulers? Who could have imagined
that atheism could produce one of the most violently operative
principles of fanaticism? Who could have imagined that, in a
commonwealth in a manner cradled in war, and in extensive and
dreadful war, military commanders should be of little or no account?
That the Convention should not contain one military man of name? That
administrative bodies in a state of the utmost confusion, and of but
a momentary duration, and composed of men with not one imposing part
of character, should be able to govern the country and its armies
with an authority which the most settled senates, and the most
respected monarchs, scarcely ever had in the same degree? This, for
one, I confess I did not foresee, though all the rest was present to
me very early, and not out of my apprehension even for several years.
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