She has been more than my better half ever since. There never passes a day on which I am not taunted with my plucking. THE REVOLUTIONS IN EUROPE When an Eastern sage was desired by his sultan to inscribe on a ring the sentiment which, amidst the perpetual change of human affairs, was most descriptive of their real tendency, he engraved on it the words:--"And this, too, shall pass away." It is impossible to imagine a thought more truly and universally applicable to human affairs than that expressed in these memorable words, or more descriptive of that perpetual oscillation from good to evil, and from evil to good, which from the beginning of the world has been the invariable characteristic of the annals of man, and so evidently flows from the strange mixture of noble and generous with base and selfish inclinations, which is constantly found in the children of Adam. "And this, too, shall pass away." The moral whirlwind which has lately swept over the states of Europe, and shaken all the kingdoms to their foundations, will subside. Old habits will in the end return--old affections revive--old desires resume their sway--old necessities become imperious. Institutions may be modified--dynasties overturned--forms of government altered--monarchs sent into exile; but the human heart remains, and will for ever remain, the same. That foundation being unaltered, the social necessities of men will in the end compel them to the old establishment of authority, under names perhaps new. Old power will revive, old rule be established, old authority be confirmed. The great body of men will still remain hewers of wood and drawers of water; because Nature never intended them for any other destination, and she has rendered them incapable of discharging the duties of any other station. Respectable, useful, and virtuous, when confined to it, they become pernicious and ridiculous when for a time withdrawn from it to be placed in another. Mind will ere long resume its sway over matter, moral over physical strength. Nations may rise in insurrection; they may destroy the existing government; they may establish a democratic or republican institution;--but that will not alter the nature of things; it will not compensate the incapacity for self-government of the great body of mankind; it will not relieve them from _the first of human necessities, that of being directed by a few_. Under one name or another--that of Decemvirs, a Triumvirate, a Committee of Public Salvation, a Directory, or a Provisional Government, the old authority is speedily evolved, only the more powerful that it has been cradled in violence. It is not the weakness, it is the irresistible strength of a democratic government which is its greatest evil. It is the iron grasp it never fails to lay on the property of others which is its principal danger, the never-failing instrument of its speedy overthrow. Property is soon swept away by it, but liberty is swept away still more quickly.