For the evil in the future is no evil, and this it is that laughs theorists and legislators to scorn! the reckoning which shall come hereafter ever is forgotten, against but a little measure of advantage offered in the present. The vengeance of Heaven, is it sure? we trust that it is far off. The axe, and the gibbet? "Chance" may save us from them; and though that deliverance hangs on the one ace cast with two dies, every sinner believes that it will be his own! The thief plans a robbery--executes it--escapes with the booty--and the "chance" that has saved him brings a hundred to the gallows! The projector trades against probability--wins in the teeth of principle--His very blindness--which could not see the risk--passes for sagacity, and crowds are beggared who follow his example! This "chance" it is--this "hope"--which makes fools--and fools are villains--of us all! Its seeds are rooted in the strongest minds; and in the weak they flourish even to insanity. The liar elects to speak on "hope." The gamester arranges to live (in a castle) upon it. But woman's brain--there is its chosen seat of quicksand empire!--where to desire an impossibility, and to account upon it, are but as one. Hope it is that makes her frail. Hope makes her false. Hope makes her the dupe of those who care not for her, and the curse of those who do. She fires a palace, and "hopes" that it will not burn. Casts herself into the sea, and "hopes" that the waters will quit their bed to leave her upon land. Her confidence--and this perhaps is the case with all of us--becomes invariably more unbounded in proportion with the real desperateness of her condition. And the worst of all is--that, as human nature is constituted, for nothing of all this is there any remedy!