is accustomed to depend; these—­elements as it were of a universe, functions of a living body—­are so opposite, in their mode of action, to the formal machine which it has been his pride to manage;—­that he has but a faint perception of their immediate efficacy; knows not the facility with which they assimilate with other powers; nor the property by which such of them—­as, from necessity of nature, must change or pass away—­will, under wise and fearless management, surely generate lawful successors to fill their place when their appropriate work is performed.  Nay, of the majority of men, who are usually found in high stations under old governments, it may without injustice be said; that, when they look about them in times (alas! too rare) which present the glorious product of such agency to their eyes, they have not a right, to say—­with a dejected man in the midst of the woods, the rivers, the mountains, the sunshine, and shadows of some transcendant landscape—­

     ‘I see, not feel, how beautiful they are:’ 

These spectators neither see nor feel.  And it is from the blindness and insensibility of these, and the train whom they draw along with them, that the throes of nations have been so ill recompensed by the births which have followed; and that revolutions, after passing from crime to crime and from sorrow to sorrow, have often ended in throwing back such heavy reproaches of delusiveness upon their first promises.

I am satisfied that no enlightened Patriot will impute to me a wish to disparage the characters of men high in authority, or to detract from the estimation which is fairly due to them.  My purpose is to guard against unreasonable expectations.  That specific knowledge,—­the paramount importance of which, in the present condition of Europe, I am insisting upon,—­they, who usually fill places of high trust in old governments, neither do—­nor, for the most part, can—­possess:  nor is it necessary, for the administration of affairs in ordinary circumstances, that they should.—­The progress of their own country, and of the other nations of the world, in civilization, in true refinement, in science, in religion, in morals, and in all the real wealth of humanity, might indeed be quicker, and might correspond more happily with the wishes of the benevolent,—­if Governors better understood the rudiments of nature as studied in the walks of common life; if they were men who had themselves felt every strong emotion ’inspired by nature and by fortune taught;’ and could calculate upon the force of the grander passions.  Yet, at the same time, there is temptation in this.  To know may seduce; and to have been agitated may compel.  Arduous cares are attractive for their own sakes.  Great talents are naturally driven towards hazard and difficulty; as it is there that they are most sure to find their exercise, and their evidence, and joy in anticipated triumph—­the liveliest of all sensations.  Moreover; magnificent desires,