ing from the object before them, and
from the present exigencies of the world, to comparisons with former
times, of which, after all, we can know very little and very
imperfectly; and our guides, the historians, who are to give us their
true interpretation, are often prejudiced, often ignorant, often fonder
of system than of truth. Whereas, if a man with reasonable good parts
and natural sagacity, and not in the leading-strings of any master, will
look steadily on the business before him, without being diverted by
retrospect and comparison, he may be capable of forming a reasonable
good judgment of what is to be done. There are some fundamental points
in which Nature never changes; but they are few and obvious, and belong
rather to morals than to politics. But so far as regards political
matter, the human mind and human affairs are susceptible of infinite
modifications, and of combinations wholly new and unlooked-for. Very
few, for instance, could have imagined that property, which has been
taken for natural dominion, should, through the whole of a vast kingdom,
lose all its importance, and even its influence. This is what history or
books of speculation could hardly have taught us. How many could have
thought that the most complete and formidable revolution in a great
empire should be made by men of letters, not as subordinate instruments
and trumpeters of sedition, but as the chief contrivers and managers,
and in a short time as the open administrators and sovereign rulers? Who
could have imagined that atheism could produce one of the most violently
operative principles of fanaticism? Who could have imagined, that, in a
commonwealth in a manner cradled in war, and in an extensive and
dreadful war, military commanders should be of little or no account,
--that the Convention should not contain one military man of name,--that
administrative bodies, in a state of the utmost confusion, and of but a
momentary duration, and composed of men with not one imposing part of
character, should be able to govern the country and its armies with an
authority which the most settled senates and the most respected monarchs
scarcely ever had in the same degree? This, for one, I confess I did not
foresee, though all the rest was present to me very early, and not out
of my apprehension even for several years.

I believe very few were able to enter into the effects of mere _terror_,
as a principle not only for the support of power in given ha