cured, must first, like other madmen, be subdued. The sound part of the
community, which I believe to be large, but by no means the largest
part, has been taken by surprise, and is disjointed, terrified, and
disarmed. That sound part of the community must first be put into a
better condition, before it can do anything in the way of deliberation
or persuasion. This must be an act of power, as well as of wisdom: of
power in the hands of firm, determined patriots, who can distinguish the
misled from traitors, who will regulate the state (if such should be
their fortune) with a discriminating, manly, and provident mercy; men
who are purged of the surfeit and indigestion of systems, if ever they
have been admitted into the habit of their minds; men who will lay the
foundation of a real reform in effacing every vestige of that philosophy
which pretends to have made discoveries in the _Terra Australia_ of
morality; men who will fix the state upon these bases of morals and
politics, which are our old and immemorial, and, I hope, will be our
eternal possession.

This power, to such men, must come from _without_. It may be given to
you in pity: for surely no nation ever called so pathetically on the
compassion of all its neighbors. It may be given by those neighbors on
motives of safety to themselves. Never shall I think any country in
Europe to be secure, whilst there is established in the very centre of
it a state (if so it may be called) founded on principles of anarchy,
and which is in reality a college of armed fanatics, for the propagation
of the principles of assassination, robbery, rebellion, fraud, faction,
oppression, and impiety. Mahomet, hid, as for a time he was, in the
bottom of the sands of Arabia, had his spirit and character been
discovered, would have been an object of precaution to provident minds.
What if he had erected his fanatic standard for the destruction of the
Christian religion _in luce Asiæ_, in the midst of the then noonday