mitted to indulge. What moral is to be drawn from this circumstance?
That we should never lose an occasion. Opportunity is more powerful even
than conquerors and prophets.

The most ancient city of the world has no antiquity. This flourishing
abode is older than many ruins, yet it does not possess one single
memorial of the past. In vain has it conquered or been conquered. Not a
trophy, a column, or an arch, records its warlike fortunes. Temples have
been raised here to unknown gods and to revealed Divinity; all have been
swept away. Not the trace of a palace or a prison, a public bath, a hall
of justice, can be discovered in this wonderful city, where everything
has been destroyed, and where nothing has decayed.

Men moralise among ruins, or, in the throng and tumult of successful
cities, recall past visions of urban desolation for prophetic warning.
London is a modern Babylon; Paris has aped imperial Rome, and may share
its catastrophe. But what do the sages say to Damascus? It had municipal
rights in the days when God conversed with Abraham. Since then, the
kings of the great monarchies have swept over it; and the Greek and the
Roman, the Tartar, the Arab, and the Turk have passed through its walls;
yet it still exists and still flourishes; is full of life, wealth,
and enjoyment. Here is a city that has quaffed the magical elixir and
secured the philosopher's stone, that is always young and always rich.
As yet, the disciples of progress have not been able exactly to match
this instance of Damascus, but it is said that they have great faith in
the future of Birkenhead.

We moralise among ruins: it is always when the game is played that we
discover the cause of the result. It is a fashion intensely European,
the habit of an organisation that, having little imagination, takes
refuge in reason, and carefully locks the door when the steed is stolen.
A community has crumbled to pieces, and it is always accounted for by
its political forms, or its religious modes. There has been a deficiency
in what is called checks in the machinery of government; the definition
of the suffrage has not been correct; what is styled responsibility has,
by some means or other, not answered; or, on the other hand, people have
believed too much or too little in a future state, have been too much
engrossed by the present, or too much absorbed in that which was to
come. But there is not a form of government which Damascus has not
experienced, ex