f Germany would be torn to pieces by the
Germans themselves. This monk will no longer pass for a prophet; he
belongs to that class of historians who write to humour their own
prejudices, like a certain lady-prophetess, who, in 1811, predicted that
grass was to grow in Cheapside about this time![193] The monk Carion,
like others of greater name, had miscalculated the weeks of Daniel, and
wished more ill to the Mahometans than suit the Christian cabinets of
Europe to inflict on them; and, lastly, the monastic historian had no
notion that it would please Providence to prosper the heresy of Luther!
Sir James Mackintosh once observed, "I am sensible that in the field of
_political prediction_ veteran sagacity has often been deceived." Sir
James alluded to the memorable example of Harrington, who published a
demonstration of the impossibility of re-establishing monarchy in
England six months before the restoration of Charles the Second! But the
author of the Oceana was a political fanatic, who ventured to predict an
event, not by other similar events, but by a theoretical principle which
he had formed, that "the balance of power depends on that of property."
Harrington, in his contracted view of human nature, had dropped out of
his calculation all the stirring passions of ambition and party, and the
vacillations of the multitude. A similar error of a great genius occurs
in De Foe. "Child," says Mr. George Chalmers, "foreseeing from
experience that men's _conduct_ must finally be decided by their
_principles_, FORETOLD _the colonial revolt_. De Foe, allowing his
prejudices to obscure his sagacity, reprobated that suggestion, because
he deemed _interest_ a more strenuous prompter than _enthusiasm_." The
predictions of Harrington and De Foe are precisely such as we might
expect from a petty calculator, a political economist, who can see
nothing farther than immediate results; but the true philosophical
predictor was Child, who had read the _past_. It is probable that the
American emancipation from the mother country of England was foreseen
twenty or thirty years before it occurred, though not perhaps by the
administration. Lord Orford, writing in 1754, under the ministry of the
Duke of Newcastle, blames "The instructions to the governor of New York,
which seemed better calculated for the latitude of Mexico, and for a
Spanish tribunal, than for a free British settlement, and in such
opulence and such haughtiness, that _suspicions h