If my voice could have been heard at the late changes, I should have
said, "Gently, patience, stop a little; the time is not yet come;
the mud of Poland will harden, and the bowels of the French
grenadiers will recover their tone. When honesty, good sense, and
liberality have extricated you out of your present embarrassment,
then dismiss them as a matter of course; but you cannot spare them
just now; don't be in too great a hurry, or there will be no monarch
to flatter, and no country to pillage; only submit for a little time
to be respected abroad, overlook the painful absence of the tax-
gatherer for a few years, bear up nobly under the increase of
freedom and of liberal policy for a little time, and I promise you,
at the expiration of that period, you shall be plundered, insulted,
disgraced, and restrained to your heart's content. Do not imagine I
have any intention of putting servility and canting hypocrisy
permanently out of place, or of filling up with courage and sense
those offices which naturally devolve upon decorous imbecility and
flexible cunning: give us only a little time to keep off the
hussars of France, and then the jobbers and jesters shall return to
their birthright, and public virtue be called by its own name of
fanaticism." Such is the advice I would have offered to my
infatuated countrymen: but it rained very hard in November, Brother
Abraham, and the bowels of our enemies were loosened, and we put our
trust in white fluxes and wet mud; and there is nothing now to
oppose to the conqueror of the world but a small table wit, and the
sallow Surveyor of the Meltings.

You ask me, if I think it possible for this country to survive the
recent misfortunes of Europe?--I answer you, without the slightest
degree of hesitation: that if Bonaparte lives, and a great deal is
not immediately done for the conciliation of the Catholics, it does