This short plan of policy is the only counsel
which will obtain a hearing. We plunge into a dark gulf with all the
rash precipitation of fear. The nature of courage is, without a
question, to be conversant with danger: but in the palpable night of
their terrors, men under consternation suppose, not that it is the
danger which by a sure instinct calls out the courage to resist it, but
that it is the courage which produces the danger. They therefore seek
for a refuge from their fears in the fears themselves, and consider a
temporizing meanness as the only source of safety.
The rules and definitions of prudence can rarely be exact, never
universal. I do not deny, that, in small, truckling states, a timely
compromise with power has often been the means, and the only means; of
drawling out their puny existence; but a great state is too much
envied, too much dreaded, to find safety in humiliation. To be secure,
it must be respected. Power and eminence and consideration are things
not to be begged; they must be commanded: and they who supplicate for
mercy from others can never hope for justice through themselves. What
justice they are to obtain, as the alms of an enemy, depends upon his
character; and that they ought well to know before they implicitly
confide.
Much controversy there has been in Parliament, and not a little amongst
us out of doors, about the instrumental means of this nation towards the
maintenance of her dignity and the assertion of her rights.
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