He Who Governs Himself According To
What He Calls His Principles, May Be Punished Either By One Party Or
The Other, For Those Very Principles.
He who proceeds without
principle, as chance, timidity, or self-preservation directs, will
not perhaps fare better; but he will be less blamed.
What are we in
the great scale of events, we poor defenceless frontier inhabitants?
What is it to the gazing world, whether we breathe or whether we
die? Whatever virtue, whatever merit and disinterestedness we may
exhibit in our secluded retreats, of what avail?
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.
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