That the effort may bear a proportion to the exigence, it is fit it should be known,—­known in its quality, in its extent, and in all the circumstances which attend it.  Great reverses of fortune there have been, and great embarrassments in council:  a principled regicide enemy possessed of the most important part of Europe, and struggling for the rest; within ourselves a total relaxation of all authority, whilst a cry is raised against it, as if it were the most ferocious of all despotism.  A worse phenomenon:  our government disowned by the most efficient member of its tribunals,—­ill-supported by any of their constituent parts,—­and the highest tribunal of all (from causes not for our present purpose to examine) deprived of all that dignity and all that efficiency which might enforce, or regulate, or, if the case required it, might supply the want of every other court.  Public prosecutions are become little better than schools for treason,—­of no use but to improve the dexterity of criminals in the mystery of evasion, or to show with what complete impunity men may conspire against the commonwealth, with what safety assassins may attempt its awful head.  Everything is secure, except what the laws have made sacred; everything is tameness and languor that is not fury and faction.  Whilst the distempers of a relaxed fibre prognosticate and prepare all the morbid force of convulsion in the body of the state, the steadiness of the physician is overpowered by the very aspect of the disease.[22] The doctor of the Constitution, pretending to underrate what he is not able to contend with, shrinks from his own operation.  He doubts and questions the salutary, but critical, terrors of the cautery and the knife.  He takes a poor credit even from his defeat, and covers impotence under the mask of lenity.  He praises the moderation of the laws, as in his hands he sees them baffled and despised.  Is all this because in our day the statutes of the kingdom are not engrossed in as firm a character and imprinted in as black and legible a type as ever?  No! the law is a clear, but it is a dead letter.  Dead and putrid, it is insufficient to save the state, but potent to infect and to kill.  Living law, full of reason, and of equity and justice, (as it is, or it should not exist,) ought to be severe, and awful too,—­or the words of menace, whether written on the parchment roll of England or cut into the brazen tablet of Borne, will excite nothing but contempt.  How comes it that in all the state prosecutions of magnitude, from the Revolution to within these two or three years, the crown has scarcely ever retired disgraced and defeated from its courts?  Whence this alarming change?  By a connection easily felt, and not impossible to be traced to its cause, all the parts of the state have their correspondence and consent.  They who bow to the enemy abroad will not be of power to subdue the conspirator at home.  It is impossible not to observe, that, in proportion as we approximate to the poisonous jaws of anarchy,