Whenever our neighbour's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own. A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and not a nursery of future revolutions. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Those who attempt to level never equalize.
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants .
Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness. This barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle.