Alas! I look in vain for some wise and vigorous man to sound the word Duty
in the ears of this generation.
[Footnote 1:
"It is with nations as with individuals. In tranquil moods and peaceable
times we are quite _practical_; facts only, and cool common sense, are then
in fashion. But let the winds of passion swell, and straightway men begin
to generalize, to connect by remotest analogies, to express the most
universal positions of reason in the most glowing figures of fancy; in
short, to feel particular truths and mere facts as poor, cold, narrow, and
incommensurate with their feelings."--_Statesman's Manual_, p. 18.
"It seems a paradox only to the unthinking, and it is a fact that none but
the unread in history will deny, that, in periods of popular tumult and
innovation, the more abstract a notion is, the more readily has it been
found to combine, the closer has appeared its affinity, with the feelings
of a people, and with all their immediate impulses to action. At the
commencement of the French Revolution, in the remotest villages every
tongue was employed in echoing and enforcing the almost geometrical
abstractions of the physiocratic politicians and economists. The public
roads were crowded with armed enthusiasts, disputing on the inalienable
sovereignty of the people, the imprescriptible laws of the pure reason, and
the universal constitution, which, as rising out of the nature and rights
of man as man, all nations alike were under the obligation of adopting.
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