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It is all the more significant on that account, since in the long run it is after all the common man that will have to pass on the expediency of any settled line of policy and to bear the material burden of carrying it into effect.

Since no one denied that the eternal interests of mankind, which devolved upon the Church, were infinitely more important than those matters of mere worldly expediency which the state regulated, it was natural for the clergy to hold that, in case of conflict, the Church and its officers, rather than the king, should have the last word.

When the news reached home of the burning of the Philadelphia, of the attack of the fireships, and of the bombardment of Tripoli, the blood of the nation was up. Arch-democratic scruples as to the expediency, economy, or constitutionality of public armed ships were thenceforth utterly disregarded. Since then, it has never been a question whether the United States should have a navy or not.

From what has been already said, too, of the language held by Sheridan on this subject, it may be concluded that, though far more ready than his friend to inscribe Reform upon the banner of the party, he had even still less made up his mind as to the practicability or expediency of the measure.

The patriotic animus is an invidious sentiment of joint prestige; and it needs no argument or documentation to bear out the affirmation that its bias will lend a color of merit and expediency to any proposed measure that can, however speciously, promise an increase of national power or prestige.

Everybody was a Republican and a Jacobin, but Robespierre now insisted on the belief in God. He perished by the monstrous imposture of associating divine sanction with the crimes of his sanguinary reign. The scheme was not suggested by expediency, for he had been always true to the idea.

These latter, at least, will doubtless disappear in time as the population gradually become aware of the expediency of rebuilding this quarter of the city, some parts of which offer striking contrasts of gorgeous splendour and squalid misery.

The loss is restricted to comparatively few, and, since the fundamental notion of all materialistic philosophy inevitably leads to selfishness, the majority of the citizens have no reason for not sacrificing the minority in their own interests. Thus, those who from the materialistic standpoint deny the necessity of war will admit its expediency from motives of self-interest.

But inasmuch as the cultivation in ourselves of a sensitive feeling on the subject of veracity, is one of the most useful, and the enfeeblement of that feeling one of the most hurtful, things to which our conduct can be instrumental; and inasmuch as any, even unintentional, deviation from truth, does that much towards weakening the trustworthiness of human assertion, which is not only the principal support of all present social well-being, but the insufficiency of which does more than any one thing that can be named to keep back civilisation, virtue, everything on which human happiness on the largest scale depends; we feel that the violation, for a present advantage, of a rule of such transcendent expediency, is not expedient, and that he who, for the sake of a convenience to himself or to some other individual, does what depends on him to deprive mankind of the good, and inflict upon them the evil, involved in the greater or less reliance which they can place in each other's word, acts the part of one of their worst enemies.

For the moment, men did not stop to consider the law or the expediency involved in the act. Public honors were tendered to Captain Wilkes, and resolutions of thanks were passed by public bodies.