al without authority is often
able to govern those who are his equals or his superiors; by a knowledge
of their temper, and by a judicious management of it; I mean,--when
public affairs are steadily and quietly conducted; not when government
is nothing but a continued scuffle between the magistrate and the
multitude; in which sometimes the one and sometimes the other is
uppermost; in which they alternately yield and prevail, in a series of
contemptible victories, and scandalous submissions. The temper of the
people amongst whom he presides ought therefore to be the first study of
a statesman. And the knowledge of this temper it is by no means
impossible for him to attain, if he has not an interest in being
ignorant of what it is his duty to learn.

To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors
of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the
future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind;
indeed the necessary effects of the ignorance and levity of the vulgar.
Such complaints and humors have existed in all times; yet as all times
have _not_ been alike, true political sagacity manifests itself in
distinguishing that complaint which only characterizes the general
infirmity of human nature, from those which are symptoms of the
particular distemperature of our own air and season.

Nobody, I believe, will consider it merely as the language of spleen or
disappointment, if I say, that there is something particularly alarming
in the present conjuncture. There is hardly a man, in or out of power,
who holds any other language. That government is at once dreaded and
contemned; that the laws are despoiled of all their respected and
salutary terrors; that their inaction is a subject of ridicule, and
their exertion of abhorrence; that rank, and office and title, and all
the solemn plausibilities of the world, have lost their reverence and
effect; that our foreign politics are as much deranged as our domestic
economy; that our dependencies are slackened in their affection, and
loosened from their obedience; that we know neither how to yield nor how
to enforce; that hardly anything above or below, abroad or at home, is
sound and entire; but that disconnection and confusion, in offices, in
parties, in families, in Parliament, in the nation, prevail beyond the
disorders of any former time: these are facts universally admitted and
lamented.

This state of things is the more