ace as the advanced guard of hope, when a sublime
movement of deliverance is to be originated;--these arrangements and
resources of nature, these ways and means of society, have so little
connection with those others upon which a ruling minister of a
long-established government is accustomed to depend; these--elements as
it were of a universe, functions of a living body--are so opposite, in
their mode of action, to the formal machine which it has been his pride
to manage;--that he has but a faint perception of their immediate
efficacy; knows not the facility with which they assimilate with other
powers; nor the property by which such of them--as, from necessity of
nature, must change or pass away--will, under wise and fearless
management, surely generate lawful successors to fill their place when
their appropriate work is performed. Nay, of the majority of men, who
are usually found in high stations under old governments, it may without
injustice be said; that, when they look about them in times (alas! too
rare) which present the glorious product of such agency to their eyes,
they have not a right, to say--with a dejected man in the midst of the
woods, the rivers, the mountains, the sunshine, and shadows of some
transcendant landscape--

'I see, not feel, how beautiful they are:'

These spectators neither see nor feel. And it is from the blindness and
insensibility of these, and the train whom they draw along with them,
that the throes of nations have been so ill recompensed by the births
which have followed; and that revolutions, after passing from crime to
crime and from sorrow to sorrow, have often ended in throwing back such
heavy reproaches of delusiveness upon their first promises.

I am satisfied that no enlightened Patriot will impute to me a wish to
disparage the characters of men high in authority, or to detract from
the estimation which is fairly due to them. My purpose is to guard
against unreasonable expectations. That specific knowledge,--the
paramount importance of which, in the present condition of Europe, I am
insisting upon,--they, who usually fill places of high trust in old
governments, neither do--nor, for the most part, can--possess: nor is it
necessary, for the administration of affairs in ordinary circumstances,
that they should.--The progress of their own country, and of the other
nations of the world, in civilization, in true refinement, in science,
in religion, in morals, and in all the