But vehement passion does
not always indicate an infirm judgment. It often accompanies, and
actuates, and is even auxiliary to a powerful understanding; and when
they both conspire and act harmoniously, their force is great to destroy
disorder within and to repel injury from abroad. If ever there was a
time that calls on us for no vulgar conception of things, and for
exertions in no vulgar strain, it is the awful hour that Providence has
now appointed to this nation. Every little measure is a great error, and
every great error will bring on no small ruin. Nothing can be directed
above the mark that we must aim at: everything below it is absolutely
thrown away.
Except with the addition of the unheard-of insult offered to our
ambassador by his rude expulsion, we are never to forget that the point
on which the negotiation with De la Croix broke off was exactly that
which had stifled in its cradle the negotiation we had attempted with
Barthelemy. Each of these transactions concluded with a manifesto upon
our part; but the last of our manifestoes very materially differed from
the first. The first Declaration stated, that "_nothing was left_ but to
prosecute a war _equally just and necessary_." In the second the justice
and necessity of the war is dropped: the sentence importing that nothing
was left but the prosecution of such a war disappears also. Instead of
this resolution to prosecute the war, we sink into a whining lamentation
on the abrupt termination of the treaty.
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