thoughtlessness is the historical fact from which liberty derives all
its recommendations, and falsehood the worst features of its
deformity. There is a reflux in the tide of human things which bears
the shipwrecked hopes of men into a secure haven after the storms are
past. Methinks, those who now live have survived an age of despair.

The French Revolution may be considered as one of those manifestations
of a general state of feeling among civilised mankind produced by a
defect of correspondence between the knowledge existing in society and
the improvement or gradual abolition of political institutions. The
year 1788 may be assumed as the epoch of one of the most important
crises produced by this feeling. The sympathies connected with that
event extended to every bosom. The most generous and amiable natures
were those which participated the most extensively in these
sympathies. But such a degree of unmingled good was expected as it was
impossible to realise. If the Revolution had been in every respect
prosperous, then misrule and superstition would lose half their claims
to our abhorrence, as fetters which the captive can unlock with the
slightest motion of his fingers, and which do not eat with poisonous
rust into the soul. The revulsion occasioned by the atrocities of the
demagogues, and the re-establishment of successive tyrannies in
France, was terrible, and felt in the remotest corner of the civilised
world. Could they listen to the plea of reason who had groaned under
the calamities of a social state according to the provisions of which
one man riots in luxury whilst another famishes for want of bread? Can
he who the day before was a trampled slave suddenly become
liberal-minded, forbearing, and independent? This is the consequence
of the habits of a state of society to be produced by resolute
perseverance and indefatigable hope, and long-suffering and
long-believing courage, and the systematic efforts of generations of