m all the germs of
conspiracy. Sir, the maxim of resisting the beginnings of evil, is as
sound in the concerns of nations as in the morality of individual minds.
Nay, I am not sure whether mischief is not more effectually done in that
incipient state, than when the evil comes full-formed. It is less
perceived, and it thus destroys with impunity. The locust, before it
gets its wings, destroys the crop with a still more rapacious tooth than
when its armies are loading the wind.

"Honourable members have talked largely of their zeal for the
constitution. Sir, I am content to follow the wisdom which judges of the
faith by the works. In my humble measure, I have been a zealous
worshipper of the constitution. There was a time when those honourable
gentlemen and myself--and I speak of that time with the regret due to
long friendship--took 'sweet counsel together,' and bowed before that
common worship as friends. That time is past. We have since taken
different paths. I have been charged with apostasy. What is my apostasy?
That I have not followed the frenzy and ingratitude of the hour; that,
while the most awful event in the history of human change has been
transacting before us, I have not shut my ears and eyes to its moral;
that I have not followed the throng into the valley, and there joined
the fabricators of the new idolatry, the priesthood of the golden calf
of revolution, and shared the polluted feast and the intoxicated dance;
while the thunders of divine vengeance were rolling on the hill above."

It was obvious from his manner, and his frequent return to the topic,
that that charge of deserting his party had deeply wounded his generous
and sensitive nature; and nothing struck me as more characteristic of
his mind, than the variety and richness of his fine amplification on
this subject.

"In those ranks," said he, "I fought for nearly the half of that portion
of life allotted to man; certainly for that portion of my course, in
which the desires, the vigour, and the applicability of all the best
parts of human nature have their fullest play. I came to it a
volunteer--I fought side by side with its foremost--I shared the 'winter
of their discontent,' as willingly as the summer of their prosperity. I
took the buffets of ill fortune, and they were many, with as cheerful a
countenance and as unshaken a fidelity as any man. But when I saw a new
banner raised among them, blazoned with mottoes of evil, and refused to
follo