moment to predominate.  For the present, however, the dread of their fury forms some sort of security to their fellows, who now exercise a more regular and therefore a somewhat less ferocious tyranny.  Most of the slaves choose a quiet, however reluctant, submission to those who are somewhat satiated with blood, and who, like wolves, are a little more tame from being a little less hungry, in preference to an irruption of the famished devourers who are prowling and howling about the fold.

This circumstance assures some degree of permanence to the power of those whom we know to be permanently our rancorous and implacable enemies.  But to those very enemies who have sworn our destruction we have ourselves given a further and far better security, by rendering the cause of the royalists desperate.  Those brave and virtuous, but unfortunate adherents to the ancient Constitution of their country, after the miserable slaughters which have been made in that body, after all their losses by emigration, are still numerous, but unable to exert themselves against the force of the usurpation evidently countenanced and upheld by those very princes who had called them to arm for the support of the legal monarchy.  Where, then, after chasing these fleeting hopes of ours from point to point of the political horizon, are they at last really found?  Not where, under Providence, the hopes of Englishmen used to be placed, in our own courage and in our own virtues, but in the moderation and virtue of the most atrocious monsters that have ever disgraced and plagued mankind.

The only excuse to be made for all our mendicant diplomacy is the same as in the case of all other mendicancy, namely, that it has been founded on absolute necessity.  This deserves consideration.  Necessity, as it has no law, so it has no shame.  But moral necessity is not like metaphysical, or even physical.  In that category it is a word of loose signification, and conveys different ideas to different minds.  To the low-minded, the slightest necessity becomes an invincible necessity.  “The slothful man saith, There is a lion in the way, and I shall be devoured in the streets.”  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.