There ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a
well-formed mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our
country, our country ought to be lovely.

But power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which
manners and opinions perish; and it will find other and worse means for
its support. The usurpation, which, in order to subvert ancient
institutions, has destroyed ancient principles, will hold power by arts
similar to those by which it has acquired it. When the old feudal and
chivalrous spirit of _fealty_, which, by freeing kings from fear, freed
both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny, shall be
extinct in the minds of men, plots and assassinations will be
anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation, and that
long roll of grim and bloody maxims which form the political code of all
power not standing on its own honor and the honor of those who are to
obey it. Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels
from principle.

When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot
possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us,
nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer. Europe, undoubtedly,
taken in a mass, was in a flourishing condition the day on which your
Revolution was completed. How much of that prosperous state was owing to
the spirit of our old manners and opinions is not easy to say; but as
such causes cannot be indifferent in their operation, we must presume,
that, on the whole, their operation was beneficial.

We are but too apt to consider things in the state in which we find
them, without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have
been produced, and possibly may be upheld. Nothing is more certain than
that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are
connected with manners and with, civilization, have, in this European
world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles, and were, indeed,
the result of both combined: I mean the spirit of a gentleman, and the
spirit of religion. The nobility and the clergy, the one by profession,
and the other by patronage, kept learning in existence, even in the
midst of arms and confusions, and whilst governments were rather in
their causes than formed. Learning paid back what it received to
nobility and to priesthood, and paid it with usury, by enlarging their
ideas, and by furnishing their minds. Happy, if they ha