But though the frantic absolutisms and irregularities of that 'old riotous form of military government,' which the long civil wars had generated, seemed of themselves to threaten speedy dissolution, this old Gascon prophet, with his inexhaustible fund of English shrewdness, and sound English sense, underlying all his Gasconading, by no means considers the state as past the statesman's care: 'after all, _we are not, perhaps, at the last gasp_,' he says. 'The conservation of states _is a thing that in all likelihood surpasses our understanding_: a civil government is, as Plato says, "a mighty and powerful thing, and hard to be dissolved." "States, as great engines, move slowly," says Lord Bacon; "and are not so soon put out of frame";--that is, so soon as "the resolution of particular persons," which is his reason for producing his moral philosophy, or rather his moral _science_, as _his_ engine for attack upon the state, a science which concerns the government of every man over himself; "for, as in Egypt, the seven good years sustained the seven bad; so governments, for a time well-grounded, do bear out errors following."' But this is the way that this Gascon philosopher records _his_ conclusions on the same subject. 'Every thing that totters does not fall. The contexture of so great a body holds by more nails than one. _It holds even by its antiquity_, like old buildings from which the foundations are worn away by time, without rough cast or cement, which yet live or support themselves by their own weight. Moreover, it is not rightly to go to work to reconnoitre only the flank and the fosse, to judge of the security of a place; it must be examined _which way approaches_ can be made to it, AND IN WHAT CONDITION THE ASSAILANT IS--that is the question. '_Few vessels sink with their own weight_, and without some exterior violence. Let us every way cast our eyes. Every thing about us totters. In all the great states, both of Christendom and elsewhere, that are known to us, if you will but look, you will there see evident threats of alteration and ruin. Astrologers need not go to heaven to foretell, as they do, GREAT REVOLUTIONS' [this is the speech of the Elizabethan age--'great revolutions'] 'and _imminent mutations_.' [This is the new kind of learning and prophecy; there was but one source of it open then, that could yield axioms of this kind; for this is the kind that Lord Bacon tells us the head-spring of sciences must be visited for.] 'But _conformity is a quality antagonist to_ DISSOLUTION. For my part, I despair not, and _fancy I perceive ways to save us_.'