Are the Whigs less aristocratic than the Tories? Not at all. In tendency by principle they are the same. The real difference is not in the creed, in the groundwork, but in certain points of practice and method. 'He took his stand upon the truth'--said by me of Sir Robert Peel--might seem to argue a lower use of '_the_ truth,' but in fact it is as happens to the article _the_ itself: you say _the_ guard, speaking of a coach; _the_ key, speaking of a trunk or watch, _i.e._, _the_ as by usage appropriated to every coach, watch, trunk. So here the truth, namely, of the particular perplexity. The Sepoy mutiny will be best understood if you suppose the Roman emperors, from Romulus to Augustus, from the Alban Fathers down to the Ostrogoths--the whole line of a thousand years crowded into two. Trunkmakers may be great men: they clearly have the upper hand of authors whom all the world admits to be great men. For the trunkmaker is the _principal_ in the concern--he makes the trunk, whereas the author, quite a secondary artist, furnishes only the linings. * * * * * _Case of Casuistry._--Wraxall justly notices that errors like Prince Rupert's from excess of courage, however ruinous, are never resented by a country. _Ergo_ the inference that prudence would be, always if in Byng's or Lord St. German's cases, in a matter of doubt held to be bold fighting; and yet in morals is that an allowable position? 6.--Personal Confessions, etc. Avaunt, ye hypocrites! who make a whining pretence, according to a fixed rule, of verbally uttering thanks to God for every chastisement, and who say this is good for you. So do not I, being upright, and God seeing my heart, who also sees that I murmur not; but if it were not good in the end, yet I submit. He is not offended that with upright sincerity I give no thanks for it. And I say that, unless a man perceives the particular way in which it has been good for him, he cannot sincerely, truly, or so as not to mock God with his lips, give thanks simply on an _a priori_ principle, though, of course, he may submit in humbleness. I do not believe that the faith of any man in the apparent fact that he will never again see such a person (_i.e._, by being removed by death) is real. I believe that the degree of faith in this respect is regulated by an original setting or fixing of our nature quite unconscious to ourselves. So, again, I believe that hope is never utterly withdrawn, despair is never absolute. And again, I believe that, at the lowest nadir, the resource of dying as a means of escape and translation to new chances and openings is lodged in every man far down below the sunlights of consciousness. He feels that his death is not final; were it otherwise he could not rush at the escape so lightly. Indeed, were his fate fixed immutably, I feel that it would not have been left possible for him to commit suicide.