If they have a
mind to destroy themselves, they may put their advocates to silence and
their advisers to shame. I have often praised the Aulic Council. It is
very true, I did so. I thought it a tribunal as well formed as human
wisdom could form a tribunal for coercing the great, the rich, and the
powerful,--for obliging them to submit their necks to the imperial laws,
and to those of Nature and of nations: a tribunal well conceived for
extirpating peculation, corruption, and oppression from all the parts of
that vast, heterogeneous mass, called the Germanic body. I should not be
inclined to retract these praises upon any of the ordinary lapses into
which human infirmity will fall; they might still stand, though some of
their _conclusums_ should taste of the prejudices of country or of
faction, whether political or religious. Some degree even of corruption
should not make me think them guilty of suicide; but if we could suppose
that the Aulic Council, not regarding duty or even common decorum,
listening neither to the secret admonitions of conscience nor to the
public voice of fame, some of the members basely abandoning their post,
and others continuing in it only the more infamously to betray it,
should give a judgment so shameless and so prostitute, of such monstrous
and even portentous corruption, that no example in the history of human
depravity, or even in the fictions of poetic imagination, could possibly
match it,--if it should be a judgment which, with cold, unfeeling
cruelty, after long deliberations, should condemn millions of innocent
people to extortion, to rapine, and to blood, and should devote some of
the finest countries upon earth to ravage and desolation,--does any one
think that any servile apologies of mine, or any strutting and bullying
insolence of their own, can save them from the ruin that must fell on
all institutions of dignity or of authority that are perverted from
their purport to the oppression of human nature in others and to its
disgrace in themselves? As the wisdom of men mates such institutions,
the folly of men destroys them.
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