system than of truth.  Whereas, if a man with reasonable 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 reasonable 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 an 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.

I believe very few were able to enter into the effects of mere terror, as a principle not only for the support of power in given hands or forms, but in those things in which the soundest political speculators were of opinion that the least appearance of force would be totally destructive,—­such is the market, whether of money, provision, or commodities of any kind.  Yet for four years we have seen loans made, treasuries supplied, and armies levied and maintained, more numerous than France ever showed in the field, by the effects of fear alone.

Here is a state of things of which in its totality if history furnishes any examples at all, they are very remote and feeble.  I therefore am not so ready as some are to tax with folly or cowardice those who were not prepared to meet an evil of this nature.  Even now, after the events, all the causes may be somewhat difficult to ascertain.  Very many are, however, traceable.  But these things history and books of speculation (as I have already said) did not teach men to foresee, and of course to resist.  Now that they are no longer a matter of sagacity, but of experience, of recent experience, of our own experience, it would be unjustifiable to go back to the records of other times to instruct us to manage what they never enabled us to foresee.