e to all the present
happiness of millions of people, and to the utter ruin of several
hundreds of thousands. In their political arrangements, men have no
right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the
question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands
is the care of our own time. With regard to futurity, we are to treat it
like a ward. We are not so to attempt an improvement of his fortune as
to put the capital of his estate to any hazard.

It is not worth our while to discuss, like sophisters, whether in no
case some evil for the sake of some benefit is to be tolerated. Nothing
universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral or any political
subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these
matters. The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of
mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of
exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and
modifications are not made by the process of logic, but by the rules of
prudence. Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues
political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the
standard of them all. Metaphysics cannot live without definition; but
Prudence is cautious how she defines. Our courts cannot be more fearful
in suffering fictitious cases to be brought before them for eliciting
their determination on a point of law than prudent moralists are in
putting extreme and hazardous cases of conscience upon emergencies not
existing. Without attempting, therefore, to define, what never can be
defined, the case of a revolution in government, this, I think, may be
safely affirmed,--that a sore and pressing evil is to be removed, and
that a good, great in its amount and unequivocal in its nature, must be
probable almost to certainty, before the inestimable price of our own
morals and the well-being of a number of our fellow-citizens is paid for
a revolution. If ever we ought to be economists even to parsimony, it is
in the voluntary production of evil. Every revolution contains in it
something of evil.

It must always be, to those who are the greatest amateurs, or even
professors, of revolutions, a matter very hard to prove, that the late
French government was so bad that nothing worse in the infinite devices
of men could come in its place. They who have brought France to its
present condition ought to prove also, by something better than
prattling about the Basti