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Updated: June 6, 2025
Such were the results of allowing dreamers, schemers, phrase-mongers, declaimers and strong men subservient to these to control a government. The first new expedient of the Directory was to secure a forced loan of six hundred million francs from the wealthier classes; but this was found fruitless.
By a revolution in the state, the fawning sycophant of yesterday is converted into the austere critic of the present hour. But steady, independent minds, when they have an object of so serious a concern to mankind as government under their contemplation, will disdain to assume the part of satirists and declaimers. They will judge of human institutions as they do of human characters.
This is all I know of him, saving these his raptures over Proclus, of which I have quoted only a small portion, and of which I can only say, in Mr. Thomas Carlyle's words, "What things men will worship, in their extreme need!" He seems to my simplicity to be at once the most timid and servile of commentators, and the most cloudy of declaimers.
He is the man above all others to argue down the declaimers of old-fashioned sentimentalities, love of country, care for its position among nations, zeal for its honour, pride in its renown.
Even the Tower ought to have no garrison except the trainbands of the Tower Hamlets. It must be evident to every intelligent and dispassionate man that these declaimers contradicted themselves.
It has, however, been the fashion of the last half century to depreciate his work, as a shapeless compilation, in which reason lies buried under a mass of authorities and quotations. This fashion originated among French wits and declaimers, and it has been, I know not for what reason, adopted, though with far greater moderation and decency, by some respectable writers among ourselves.
As the great Frederick said, "There are no neutrals where there is war." Ignorant advocates and babblers have asked, in the Club of Clichy, why we occupy the territory of Venice. These declaimers should learn war, and they would know that the Adige, the Brenta, and the Tagliamento, where we have been fighting for two years, are within the Venetian States.
Accordingly we find, that many religious declaimers decry those virtues as purely pagan and natural, and represent to us the excellency of the Christian religion, which places humility in the rank of virtues, and corrects the judgment of the world, and even of philosophers, who so generally admire all the efforts of pride and ambition.
As the great Frederick said, "There are no neutrals where there is war." Ignorant advocates and babblers have asked, in the Club of Clichy, why we occupy the territory of Venice. These declaimers should learn war, and they would know that the Adige, the Brenta, and the Tagliamento, where we have been fighting for two years, are within the Venetian States.
They had too often already been the dupes of his hypocrisy, the victims of their own credulity; they scrupled not, both in public companies, and from the pulpit, to pronounce him "a dissembling perjured villain;" and they openly threatened him with "a worse fate than had befallen the last tyrant." If it was necessary to silence these declaimers, it was also dangerous to treat them with severity.
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