Resistance not only to evil, but to the principle of evil; not only to disorder, but to the passions and the ideas which engender disorder--this is the paramount and peremptory duty of every government. And the greater the empire of Democracy, the more important is it that government should hold fast to its true character, and act its true part in the struggle which agitates society. Why is it that so many democracies--some of them very brilliant--have so rapidly perished? Because they would not suffer their governments to do their duty, and fulfil the objects for which governments are instituted. They did more than reduce them to weakness; they condemned them to falsehood. It is the melancholy condition of democratic governments, that while charged--as they must be--with the repression of disorder, they are required to be complaisant and indulgent to the causes of disorder; they are expected to arrest the evil when it breaks out, and yet they are asked to foster it whilst it is hatching. I know no more deplorable spectacle than a power which, in the struggle between the good and the evil principle, continually bends the knee before the bad, and then attempts to resume an attitude of vigour and independence when it becomes necessary to resist its excesses. If you will not have excesses, you must repress them in their origin. If you wish for liberty--for the full and glorious development of human nature--learn first on what conditions this is attainable; look forward to its consequences. Do not blind yourselves to the perils and the combats it will occasion. And when these combats and these perils arise, do not require your leaders to be hypocritical or weak in their dealings with the enemy. Do not force upon them the worship of idols, even were you yourselves those idols. Permit them, nay command them, to worship and to serve the true God alone. I might here allow myself the satisfaction of recalling the names of all the rulers who have fallen shamefully because they submitted basely to be the slaves or the tools of the errors and passions of the democracies it was their duty and their vocation to govern; but I had rather dwell on the memory of those who lived gloriously by resisting them. It is more to my taste to prove the truth by examples of the success which crowns wisdom, than by those of the disasters which attend on folly.