it into an instrument for new conquests over new difficulties:  thus to enable them to extend the empire of their science, and even to push forward, beyond the reach of their original thoughts, the landmarks of the human understanding itself.  Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental Guardian and Legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, as He loves us better too. Pater ipse colendi haud facilem esse viam voluit.  He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill.  Our antagonist is our helper.  This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations.  It will not suffer us to be superficial.  It is the want of nerves of understanding for such a task, it is the degenerate fondness for tricking short-outs and little fallacious facilities, that has in so many parts of the world created governments with arbitrary powers.  They have created the late arbitrary monarchy of France.  They have created the arbitrary republic of Paris.  With them defects in wisdom are to be supplied by the plenitude of force.  They get nothing by it.  Commencing their labors on a principle of sloth, they have the common fortune of slothful men.  The difficulties, which they rather had eluded than escaped, meet them again in their course; they multiply and thicken on them; they are involved, through a labyrinth of confused detail, in an industry without limit and without direction; and in conclusion, the whole of their work becomes feeble, vicious, and insecure.

It is this inability to wrestle with difficulty which has obliged the arbitrary Assembly of France to commence their schemes of reform with abolition and total destruction.[120] But is it in destroying and pulling down that skill is displayed?  Your mob can do this as well at least as your assemblies.  The shallowest understanding, the rudest hand, is more than equal to that task.  Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.  The errors and defects of old establishments are visible and palpable.  It calls for little ability to point them out; and where absolute power is given, it requires but a word wholly to abolish the vice and the establishment together.  The same lazy, but restless disposition, which loves sloth and hates quiet, directs these politicians, when they come to work for supplying the place of what they have destroyed.  To make everything the reverse of what they have seen is quite as easy as to destroy.  No difficulties occur in what has never been tried.  Criticism is almost baffled in discovering the defects of what has not existed; and eager enthusiasm and cheating hope have all the wide field of imagination, in which they may expatiate with little or no opposition.