We plunge into a dark
gulf with all the rash precipitation of fear. The nature of courage is,
without a question, to be conversant with danger: but in the palpable
night of their terrors, men under consternation suppose, not that it is
the danger, which, by a sure instinct, calls out the courage to resist
it, but that it is the courage which produces the danger. They therefore
seek for a refuge from their fears in the fears themselves, and consider
a temporizing meanness as the only source of safety.
The rules and definitions of prudence can rarely be exact; never
universal. I do not deny, that, in small, truckling states, a timely
compromise with power has often been the means, and the only means, of
drawling out their puny existence: but a great state is too much envied,
too much dreaded, to find safety in humiliation. To be secure, it must
be respected. Power, and eminence, and consideration, are things not to
be begged. They must be commanded: and they who supplicate for mercy
from others, can never hope for justice through themselves. What justice
they are to obtain, as the alms of an enemy, depends upon his character;
and that they ought well to know before they implicitly confide.
HISTORICAL INSTRUCTION.
Such is the effect of the perversion of history, by those, who, for
the same nefarious purposes, have perverted every other part of
learning.
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