Confident, insolent in the day of success, and while their cause is triumphant, they are as soon dejected and driven to despair, when they find the tide turned against them. Fortune is with them the first of goddesses: success the only title to authority and respect; and possession the truest right. Accustomed to all the fluctuations of hope and fear, they consider nothing stable in human affairs; thrown into the possession of power and affluence by accidents which they know not how to account for, it can hardly seem strange to them that they should again be stripped of them. They do not ‘lay the fault upon themselves but on their stars, that they are underlings.’ If I hear a man say that we are to give up our public principles whenever circumstances render it necessary, that we are to inquire upon all occasions not what is right, but what is prudent to be done, that those feelings, which lead us to adhere to the cause of truth and justice if at all unpopular, or to incur any personal risk or inconvenience in defending what is right, are weak and vulgar prejudices, I know that that man will be first to truckle to an enemy, and the last voluntarily to risk his life in defence of his independence. The courage of the soldier and the citizen are essentially different. The one is momentary and involuntary; the other permanent and voluntary. It is one thing to do all in your power to repel danger when it is unavoidable, and another to expose yourself to it when you may avoid going into it. Fear, or rashness, or necessity may be supposed to kindle all the fury of battle: but principle alone can make us willing to return to the charge after defeat. It is for this _re-action_ that we ought to be chiefly prepared. For this nothing can prepare us but a true love of our country, not taken up as a fashion, but felt as a duty; a spirit of resistance not measured by our convenience, but by the strength of our attachment and the real value of the object; but steady enthusiasm; but a determination never to submit while hope or life remained, and an indifference to every thing else but that one great object. What resistance has Holland ever made to the power of France from the first moment? Commerce had spread its sordid mantle completely over her. Wrapped closely up in this, she fell without resistance and without a groan: she was not of a temper to fall in love with danger, to court disasters. Since that time she has not made a struggle or breathed a sigh for her release, but lies supine, secure, unmoved, and torpid, ‘Dull as her lakes that slumber in the storm.’