" But when the necessity pleaded is not in the
nature of things, but in the vices of him who alleges it, the whining
tones of commonplace beggarly rhetoric produce nothing but indignation:
because they indicate a desire of keeping up a dishonorable existence,
without utility to others, and without dignity to itself; because they
aim at obtaining the dues of labor without industry, and by frauds would
draw from the compassion of others what men ought to owe to their own
spirit and their own exertions.
I am thoroughly satisfied, that, if we degrade ourselves, it is the
degradation which will subject us to the yoke of necessity, and not that
it is necessity which has brought on our degradation. In this same
chaos, where light and darkness are struggling together, the open
subscription of last year, with all its circumstances, must have given
us no little glimmering of hope: not (as I have heard it was vainly
discoursed) that the loan could prove a crutch to a lame negotiation
abroad, and that the whiff and wind of it must at once have disposed the
enemies of all tranquillity to a desire for peace. Judging on the face
of facts, if on them it had any effect at all, it had the direct
contrary effect; for very soon after the loan became public at Paris,
the negotiation ended, and our ambassador was ignominiously expelled. My
view of this was different: I liked the loan, not from the influence
which it might have on the enemy, but on account of the temper which it
indicated in our own people.
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