We are like the pismires destroyed by the plough; whose destruction prevents not the future crop.  Self-preservation, therefore, the rule of nature, seems to be the best rule of conduct; what good can we do by vain resistance, by useless efforts?  The cool, the distant spectator, placed in safety, may arraign me for ingratitude, may bring forth the principles of Solon or Montesquieu; he may look on me as wilfully guilty; he may call me by the most opprobrious names.  Secure from personal danger, his warm imagination, undisturbed by the least agitation of the heart, will expatiate freely on this grand question; and will consider this extended field, but as exhibiting the double scene of attack and defence.  To him the object becomes abstracted, the intermediate glares, the perspective distance and a variety of opinions unimpaired by affections, presents to his mind but one set of ideas.  Here he proclaims the high guilt of the one, and there the right of the other; but let him come and reside with us one single month, let him pass with us through all the successive hours of necessary toil, terror and affright, let him watch with us, his musket in his hand, through tedious, sleepless nights, his imagination furrowed by the keen chisel of every passion; let his wife and his children become exposed to the most dreadful hazards of death; let the existence of his property depend on a single spark, blown by the breath of an enemy; let him tremble with us in our fields, shudder at the rustling of every leaf; let his heart, the seat of the most affecting passions, be powerfully wrung by hearing the melancholy end of his relations and friends; let him trace on the map the progress of these desolations; let his alarmed imagination predict to him the night, the dreadful night when it may be his turn to perish, as so many have perished before.  Observe then, whether the man will not get the better of the citizen, whether his political maxims will not vanish!  Yes, he will cease to glow so warmly with the glory of the metropolis; all his wishes will be turned toward the preservation of his family!  Oh, were he situated where I am, were his house perpetually filled, as mine is, with miserable victims just escaped from the flames and the scalping knife, telling of barbarities and murders that make human nature tremble; his situation would suspend every political reflection, and expel every abstract idea.  My heart is full and involuntarily takes hold of any notion from whence it can receive ideal ease or relief.  I am informed that the king has the most numerous, as well as the fairest, progeny of children, of any potentate now in the world:  he may be a great king, but he must feel as we common mortals do, in the good wishes he forms for their lives and prosperity.  His mind no doubt often springs forward on the wings of anticipation, and contemplates us as happily settled in the world.  If a poor frontier inhabitant may be allowed to suppose this great personage the first in our system, to be