American fiction -- 19th century; Historical fiction; Indians of North America -- Fiction
The ignis fatuus of human happiness employs all minds, all faculties,
all pens, and all theories, just at this particular moment. A thousand
projects have been broached, will continue to be broached, and will
fail, each in its time, showing the mistakes of men, without remedying
the evils of which they complain. This is not because a beneficent
Providence has neglected to enlighten their minds, and to show them the
way to be happy, here and hereafter; but because human conceit runs,
pari passu, with human woes, and we are too proud to look for our
lessons of conduct, in that code in which they have been set before us
by unerring wisdom and ceaseless love. If the political economists,
and reformers, and revolutionists of the age, would turn from their
speculations to those familiar precepts which all are taught and so few
obey, they would find rules for every emergency; and, most of all, would
they learn the great secret which lies so profoundly hid from them and
their philosophy, in the contented mind. Nothing short of this will ever
bring the mighty reform that the world needs. The press may be declared
free, but a very brief experience will teach those who fancy that this
one conquest will secure the victory, that they have only obtained King
Stork in the lieu of King Log; a vulgar and most hideous tyrant for one
of royal birth and gentle manners. They may set up the rule of patriots
by profession, in place of the dominion of those who have so long
pretended that the art of governing descends from male to male,
according to the order of primogeniture, and live to wonder that love
of country should have so many weaknesses in common with love of itself.
They may rely on written charters for their liberties, instead of
the divine right of kings, and come perchance to learn, that neither
language, nor covenants, nor signatures, nor seals avail much, as
against the necessities of nations, and the policy of rulers. Do we then
regard reform as impossible, and society to be doomed to struggle on in
its old sloughs of oppression and abuses? Far from it. We believe and
hope, that at each effort of a sage character, something is gained,
while much more than had been expected is lost; and such we think will
continue to be the course of events, until men shall reach that period
in their history when, possibly to their wonder, they will find that a
faultless code for the government of all their affairs has been lying
neglected, daily and hourly, in their very hands, for eighteen centuries
and a half, without their perceiving the all-important truth. In due
season this code will supersede all others, when the world will, for the
first time, be happy and truly free.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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