He is preeminently a man of many thoughts,
with no ideas: hence he is always so lengthy, because he must go through
every thing to see any thing.
* * * * *
It is a melancholy thing to live when there is no vision in the land. Where
are our statesmen to meet this emergency? I see no reformer who asks
himself the question, _What_ is it that I propose to myself to effect in
the result?
Is the House of Commons to be re-constructed on the principle of a
representation of interests, or of a delegation of men? If on the former,
we may, perhaps, see our way; if on the latter, you can never, in reason,
stop short of universal suffrage; and in that case, I am sure that women
have as good a right to vote as men.[1]
[Footnote 1:
In Mr. Coleridge's masterly analysis and confutation of the physiocratic
system of the early French revolutionists, in the Friend, he has the
following passage in the nature of a _reductio ad absurdum_. "Rousseau,
indeed, asserts that there is an inalienable sovereignty inherent in every
human being possessed of reason; and from this the framers of the
Constitution of 1791 deduce, that the people itself is its own sole
rightful legislator, and at most dare only recede so far from its right as
to delegate to chosen deputies the power of representing and declaring the
general will.
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