iples nor
our dispositions, nor, perhaps, our talents, enable us to encounter
delusion with delusion, we must use our best reason to those that ought
to be reasonable creatures, and to take our chance for the event. We
cannot act on these anomalies in the minds of men. I do not conceive
that the persons who have contrived these things can be made much the
better or the worse for anything which can be said to them. _They_ are
reason-proof. Here and there, some men, who were at first carried away
by wild, good intentions, may be led, when their first fervors are
abated, to join in a sober survey of the schemes into which they had
been deluded. To those only (and I am sorry to say they are not likely
to make a large description) we apply with any hope. I may speak it upon
an assurance almost approaching to absolute knowledge, that nothing has
been done that has not been contrived from the beginning, even before
the States had assembled. _Nulla nova mihi res inopinave surgit._ They
are the same men and the same designs that they were from the first,
though varied in their appearance. It was the very same animal that at
first crawled about in the shape of a caterpillar that you now see rise
into the air and expand his wings to the sun.

Proceeding, therefore, as we are obliged to proceed,--that is, upon an
hypothesis that we address rational men,--can false political principles
be more effectually exposed than by demonstrating that they lead to
consequences directly inconsistent with and subversive of the
arrangements grounded upon them? If this kind of demonstration is not
permitted, the process of reasoning called _deductio ad absurdum_, which
even the severity of geometry does not reject, could not be employed at
all in legislative discussions. One of our strongest weapons against
folly acting with authority would be lost.

You know, Sir, that even the virtuous efforts of your patriots to
prevent the ruin of your country have had this very turn given to them.
It has been said here, and in France too, that the reigning usurpers
would not have carried their tyranny to such destructive lengths, if
they had not been stimulated and provoked to it by the acrimony of your
opposition. There is a dilemma to which every opposition to successful
iniquity must, in the nature of things, be liable. If you lie still, you
are considered as an accomplice in the measures in which you silently
acquiesce. If you resist, you are accused of p