rovoking irritable power
to new excesses. The conduct of a losing party never appears right: at
least, it never can possess the only infallible criterion of wisdom to
vulgar judgments,--success.

The indulgence of a sort of undefined hope, an obscure confidence, that
some lurking remains of virtue, some degree of shame, might exist in the
breasts of the oppressors of France, has been among the causes which
have helped to bring on the common ruin of king and people. There is no
safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men,
and by acting with promptitude, decision, and steadiness on that belief.
I well remember, at every epocha of this wonderful history, in every
scene of this tragic business, that, when your sophistic usurpers were
laying down mischievous principles, and even applying them in direct
resolutions, it was the fashion to say that they never intended to
execute those declarations in their rigor. This made men careless in
their opposition, and remiss in early precaution. By holding out this
fallacious hope, the impostors deluded sometimes one description of men,
and sometimes another, so that no means of resistance were provided
against them, when they came to execute in cruelty what they had planned
in fraud.

There are cases in which a man would be ashamed not to have been imposed
on. There is a confidence necessary to human intercourse, and without
which men are often more injured by their own suspicions than they would
be by the perfidy of others. But when men whom we _know_ to be wicked
impose upon us, we are something worse than dupes. When we know them,
their fair pretences become new motives for distrust. There is one case,
indeed, in which it would be madness not to give the fullest credit to
the most deceitful of men,--that is, when they make declarations of
hostility against us.

I find that some persons entertain other hopes, which I confess appear
more specious than those by which at first so many were deluded and
disarmed. They flatter themselves that the extreme misery brought upon
the people by their folly will at last open the eyes of the multitude,
if not of their leaders. Much the contrary, I fear. As to the leaders in
this system of imposture,--you know that cheats and deceivers never can
repent. The fraudulent have no resource but in fraud. They have no other
goods in their magazine. They have no virtue or wisdom in their minds,
to which, in a disappointment con