virtue to those who direct our affairs. But they are incumbered, not
aided, by their very instruments, and by all the apparatus of the state.
I think that our ministry (though there are things against them which
neither you nor I can dissemble, and which grieve me to the heart) is by
far the most honest and by far the wisest system of administration in
Europe. Their fall would be no trivial calamity.

Not meaning to depreciate the minority in Parliament, whose talents are
also great, and to whom I do not deny virtues, their system seems to me
to be fundamentally wrong. But whether wrong or right, they have not
enough of coherence among themselves, nor of estimation with the public,
nor of numbers. They cannot make up an administration. Nothing is more
visible. Many other things are against them, which I do not charge as
faults, but reckon among national misfortunes. Extraordinary things must
be done, or one of the parties cannot stand as a ministry, nor the other
even as an opposition. They cannot change their situations, nor can any
useful coalition be made between them. I do not see the mode of it nor
the way to it. This aspect of things I do not contemplate with pleasure.

I well know that everything of the daring kind which I speak of is
critical: but the times are critical. New things in a new world! I see
no hopes in the common tracks. If men are not to be found who can be got
to feel within them some impulse, _quod nequeo monstrare, et sentio
tantum_, and which makes them impatient of the present,--if none can be
got to feel that private persons may sometimes assume that sort of
magistracy which does not depend on the nomination of kings or the
election of the people, but has an inherent and self-existent power
which both would recognize, I see nothing in the world to hope.

If I saw such a group beginning to cluster, such as they are, they
should have (all that I can give) my prayers and my advice. People talk
of war or cry for peace: have they to the bottom considered the
questions either of war or peace, upon the scale of the existing world?
No, I fear they have not.

Why should not you yourself be one of those to enter your name in such a
list as I speak of? You are young; you have great talents; you have a
clear head; you have a natural, fluent, and unforced elocution; your
ideas are just, your sentiments benevolent, open, and enlarged;--but
this is too big for your modesty. Oh! this modesty, in time and p