However upright the intentions may be of the first leaders of popular insurrections, it may be truly said of them, in the end, instruments of cruelty are in their habitations; nay, must be, for when they have proceeded a certain length, conciliation or lenity would be cruelty to their followers, who are gone too far to return to the place from which they set out. Rectitude, hitherto upheld by laws, by custom, and by fear, now walks alone, in unaccustomed paths, and like a tottering infant, falls at the first assault, or first obstacle it meets; but falls to rise no more. Let any one who has mixed much with mankind, say what would be the consequence if restraint were withdrawn, and impunity offered to all those whose probity is not fixed on the basis of real piety, or supported by singular fortitude, and that sound sense which, discerning remote consequences, preserves integrity as armour of proof against the worst that can happen. True it is, that amidst these convulsions of the moral world, exigencies bring out some characters that sweep across the gloom like meteors in a tempestuous night, which would not have been distinguished in the sunshine of prosperity. It is in the swell of the turbulent ocean that the mightiest living handiworks of the author of nature are to be met with. Great minds, no doubt, are called out by exigencies, and put forth all their powers. Though Hercules slew the Hydra, and cleansed the Augæan stable, all but poets and heroes must have regretted that any such monsters existed. Seriously, beside the rancour, the treachery, and the dereliction of every generous sentiment and upright motive, which are the rank production of the blood-manured field of civil discord, after the froth and feculence of its cauldron have boiled over, still the deleterious dregs remain. Truth is the first victim to fear and policy; when matters arrive at that crisis, every one finds a separate interest; mutual confidence, which cannot outlive sincerity, dies next, and all the kindred virtues drop in succession. It becomes a man’s interest that his brothers and his father should join the opposite party, that some may be applauded for steadiness or enriched by confiscations. To such temptations the mind, fermenting with party hatred, yields with less resistance than could be imagined by those who have never witnessed such scenes of horror, darkened by duplicity. After so deep a plunge in depravity, how difficult, how near to impossible is a return to the paths of rectitude! This is but a single instance of the manner in which moral feeling is undermined in both parties. But as our nature, destined to suffer and to mourn, and to have the heart made better by affliction, finds adversity a less dangerous trial than prosperity, especially where it is great and sudden, in all civil conflicts, the triumphant party may, with moral truth, be said to be the greatest sufferers. Intoxicated as they often are with power and