{18} Gentlemen, when such dangers hedge our political edifice; when we recollect the storms which have already burst upon it, and that, although it has survived them, we have no guarantee for its withstanding even less furious ones hereafter--as a ship may ride out many a tempest safely, and yet be so racked in her joints as to go down at last under a capful of wind; above all, when we reflect that the same cankers which have destroyed all former commonwealths, are now at work within our own;--it would betoken, to my view, more of irrational credulity than of patriotism, to feel that sanguine, unconditional confidence in the durableness of our institutions, which those profess, who are perpetually making it the test of good citizenship "_never_ to despair of the republic." But is it ever to be thus? Were then the visions of liberty for centuries on centuries, which our fathers so fondly cherished, all deceitful? Were the toil, and treasure, and blood they lavished as that liberty's price, all lavished in vain? Is there no deliverance for man, from the doom of subjection which kings and their minions pronounce against him? No remedy for the diseases which, in freedom's apparently most healthful state, menace her with death? If it is not ever to be thus; if the anticipations of our revolutionary patriots were not all delusive dreams, and their blood fell not in vain to the ground; if man's general doom is not subjection, and the examples of his freedom are not mere deceitful glimmerings up of happiness above the fixed darkness which enwraps him, designed but to amuse his fancy and to cheat his hopes; if there is a remedy for the diseases that poison the health of liberty;--the reason--that remedy--can be found only in one short precept--ENLIGHTEN THE PEOPLE! Nothing--I scruple not to avow--it has been my thought for years--nothing but my reliance on the efficacy of this precept, prevents my being, at this instant, _a monarchist_. Did I not, with burning confidence, believe that the people can be enlightened, and that they may so escape the dangers which encompass them, I should be for consigning them at once to the calm of hereditary monarchy. But this confidence makes me no monarchist: makes me, I trust, a true _whig_; not in the party acceptation of the day, but in the sense, employed by Jefferson, of one who _trusts and cherishes the people_.[2] Throughout his life, we find that great statesman insisting upon _popular instruction_ as an inseparable requisite to his belief in the permanency of any popular government: "Ignorance and bigotry," said he, "like other insanities, are incapable of self-government." His authority might be fortified by those of Sidney, Montesquieu, and of all who have written extensively or luminously upon free government: but this is no time for elaborate quotations; and indeed why cite authorities, to prove what is palpable to the glance?