Let the necessary cause be exerted which will give vent to this hidden power and actions the most astonishing and destructive would be the effect.  These are often witnessed in the tremendous earthquakes which devastate whole cities, states, and empires; in the tornados which pass, like the genius of evil, over the land, levelling whatever is found in its course; or in the waterspouts and maelstroms which prove the grave of all that comes within their grasp.

In the attempted destruction of the royal family and parliament of England, by what is usually called the “gunpowder plot,” the arrangements were all made; two hogsheads and thirty-six barrels of powder, sufficient to blow up the house of lords and the surrounding buildings, were secreted in a vault beneath it, strown over with faggots.  Guy Fawkes, a spanish officer, employed for the purpose, lay at the door, on the 5th of November, 1605, with the matches, or means, in his pocket, which should set in operation the prodigious dormant power, which would hurl to destruction James I., the royal family, and the protestant parliament, give the ascendancy to the Catholics, and change the whole political condition of the nation.  The project was discovered, the means were removed, the cause taken away, and the threatened effects were prevented.

The =cause= of action is the immediate subject which precedes or tends to produce the action, without which it would not take place.  It may result from volition, inherent tendency, or communicated impulse; and is known to exist from the effects produced by it, in the altered or new condition of the thing on which it operates; which change would not have been effected without it.

Causes are to be sought for by tracing back thro the effects which are produced by them.  The factory is put in operation, and the cloth is manufactured.  The careless observer would enter the building and see the spindles, looms, and wheels operated by the hands, and go away satisfied that he has seen enough, seen all.  But the more careful will look farther.  He will trace each band and wheel, each cog and shaft, down by the balance power, to the water race and floom; or thro the complicated machinery of the steam engine to the piston, condenser, water, wood, and fire; marking a new, more secret, and yet more efficient cause at each advancing step.  But all this curiously wrought machinery is not the product of chance, operated without care.  A superior cause must be sought in human skill, in the deep and active ingenuity of man.  Every contrivance presupposes a contriver.  Hence there must have been a power and means sufficient to combine and regulate the power of the water, or generate and direct the steam.  That power is vested in man; and hence, man stands as the cause, in relation to the whole process operated by wheels, bands, spindles, and looms.  Yet we may say, with propriety, that the water, or the steam; the water-wheel, or the piston; the shafts, bands, cogs, pullies, spindles, springs, treddles, harnesses, reeds, shuttles, an almost endless concatenation of instruments, are alike the causes, which tend to produce the final result; for let one of these intermediate causes be removed, and the whole power will be diverted, and all will go wrong—­the effect will not be produced.