“to have an obstinate constitutional preference of the true over the agreeable; and I am satisfied, that, if I had had an only son, or what is dearer, an only daughter,—­which God forbid!—­I say, God forbid, for she might bring her father’s gray hairs with sorrow to the grave; she might break my heart, or worse than that—­what?  Can anything be worse than that?  Yes, sir, I might break hers!”

His fable, too, of the caterpillar and the horseman was conceived in arrogance, but it was pretty and effective.  Every tory intellect on earth is pleased to discourse in that way of the labors of the only men who greatly help their species,—­the patient elaborators of truth.  A caterpillar, as we learn from this fable, had crawled slowly over a fence, which a gallant horseman took at a single leap.  “Stop,” says the caterpillar,

“you are too flighty; you want connection and continuity; it took me an hour to get over; you can’t be as sure as I am that you have really overcome the difficulty, and are indeed over the fence.”

To which, of course, the gallant horseman makes the expected contemptuous reply.  This is precisely in the spirit of Carlyle’s sneers at the political economists,—­the men who are not content to sit down and howl in this wilderness of a modern world, but bestir themselves to discover methods by which it can be made less a wilderness.

There is so much truth in the doctrines of the original States’ Rights party,—­the party of Jefferson, Madison, and Patrick Henry,—­that a very commonplace man, who learned his politics in that school, is able to make a respectable figure in the public counsels.  The mere notion that government, being a necessary evil, is to be reduced to the minimum that will answer the purposes of government, saves from many false steps.  The doctrine that the central government is to confine itself to the duties assigned it in the Constitution, is a guiding principle suited to the limited human mind.  A vast number of claims, suggestions, and petitions are excluded by it even from consideration.  If an eloquent Hamiltonian proposes to appropriate the public money for the purpose of enabling American manufacturers to exhibit their products at a Paris Exhibition, the plainest country member of the Jeffersonian school perceives at once the inconsistency of such a proposition with the fundamental principle of his political creed.  He has a compass to steer by, and a port to sail to, instead of being afloat on the waste of waters, the sport of every breeze that blows.  It is touching to observe that this unhappy, sick, and sometimes mad John Randolph, amid all the vagaries of his later life, had always a vein of soundness in him, derived from his early connection with the enlightened men who acted in politics with Thomas Jefferson.  The phrase “masterly inactivity” is Randolph’s; and it is something only to have given convenient expression to a system of conduct so often wise.