the fascination grows irresistible.  In proportion as we are attracted towards the focus of illegality, irreligion, and desperate enterprise, all the venomous and blighting insects of the state are awakened into life.  The promise of the year is blasted and shrivelled and burned up before them.  Our most salutary and most beautiful institutions yield nothing but dust and smut; the harvest of our law is no more than stubble.  It is in the nature of these eruptive diseases in the state to sink in by fits and reappear.  But the fuel of the malady remains, and in my opinion is not in the smallest degree mitigated in its malignity, though it waits the favorable moment of a freer communication with the source of regicide to exert and to increase its force.

Is it that the people are changed, that the commonwealth cannot be protected by its laws?  I hardly think it.  On the contrary, I conceive that these things happen because men are not changed, but remain always what they always were; they remain what the bulk of us ever must be, when abandoned to our vulgar propensities, without guide, leader, or control:  that is, made to be full of a blind elevation in prosperity; to despise untried dangers; to be overpowered with unexpected reverses; to find no clew in a labyrinth of difficulties; to get out of a present inconvenience with any risk of future ruin; to follow and to bow to fortune; to admire successful, though wicked enterprise, and to imitate what we admire; to contemn the government which announces danger from sacrilege and regicide whilst they are only in their infancy and their struggle, but which finds nothing that can alarm in their adult state, and in the power and triumph of those destructive principles.  In a mass we cannot be left to ourselves.  We must have leaders.  If none will undertake to lead us right, we shall find guides who will contrive to conduct us to shame and ruin.

We are in a war of a peculiar nature.  It is not with an ordinary community, which is hostile or friendly as passion or as interest may veer about,—­not with a state which makes war through wantonness, and abandons it through lassitude.  We are at war with a system which by its essence is inimical to all other governments, and which makes peace or war as peace and war may best contribute to their subversion.  It is with an armed doctrine that we are at war.  It has, by its essence, a faction of opinion and of interest and of enthusiasm in every country.  To us it is a Colossus which bestrides our Channel.  It has one foot on a foreign shore, the other upon the British soil.  Thus advantaged, if it can at all exist, it must finally prevail.  Nothing can so completely ruin any of the old governments, ours in particular, as the acknowledgment, directly or by implication, of any kind of superiority in this new power.  This acknowledgment we make, if, in a bad or doubtful situation of our affairs, we solicit peace, or if we yield to the modes of new humiliation in which alone she is content to give us an hearing.  By that means the terms cannot be of our choosing,—­no, not in any part.