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The culprit himself took a very different view, came home presently in great wrath, and proceeded to pose as a martyr and compile a vindication, which he entitled "A View of the Conduct of the Executive," and which surpassed in bulk any of the vindications in which that period of our history was prolific.
"I allow that there is a strange mixture of fustian and maudlin in all these things," answered De Montaigne; "but they are but the windfalls of trees that may bear rich fruit in due season; meanwhile, any new school is better than eternal imitations of the old. As for critical vindications of the works themselves, the age that produces the phenomena is never the age to classify and analyze them.
And then they will establish to their own satisfaction that the other fellow was guilty of "causing the war." Statesmen, dead and not yet dead, in all countries will take to their typewriters and they will explain how they tried to avert hostilities and how their wicked opponents forced them into it. The historian, a hundred years hence, will not bother about these apologies and vindications.
She was growing up now to a subtler wisdom. People, she was beginning to realise, do not do these simple things. They make vows of devotion and they are not real vows of devotion; they love quite honestly and qualify. There are no great revenges but only little mean ones; no life-long vindications except the unrelenting vengeance of the law.
My first public lecture ``Civilization in Russia''; its political bearing; attacks upon it and vindications of it. Its later history. My arrival at the University of Michigan. Political side of professorial life. General purpose of my lectures in the university and throughout the State. My articles in the ``Atlantic Monthly. President Buchanan, John Brown Stephen A. Douglas, and others.
There are, indeed, some passages which would not disgrace the greatest abilities, and some maxims true in themselves, though perhaps fallaciously applied, and at least such an appearance of reasoning and knowledge, as sets the writer far above the level of the contemptible scribblers of the ministerial vindications: a herd of wretches whom neither information can enlighten, nor affluence elevate; low drudges of scurrility, whose scandal is harmless for want of wit, and whose opposition is only troublesome from the pertinaciousness of stupidity.
But it is really sickening to read these unprincipled vindications of the scoundrels who drive the people into crime and bloodshed by their rack-renting and oppression. It is time that honest men should speak out, and fasten upon these scourges of their country, their proper appellative.
We ought to take in connection with it two at any rate of the vindications of the Discourse, which the course of controversy provoked from its author, and which serve to complete its significance. It is difficult to analyse, because in truth it is neither closely argumentative, nor is it vertebrate, even as a piece of rhetoric. The gist of the piece, however, runs somewhat in this wise:
We may say in fine that this first Discourse and its vindications were a dim, shallow, and ineffective feeling after the great truth, that the only normal state of society is that in which neither the love of virtue has been thrust far back into a secondary place by the love of knowledge, nor the active curiosity of the understanding dulled, blunted, and made ashamed by soft, lazy ideals of life as a life only of the affections.
This reminds me of a remark, I have elsewhere made respecting the expediency of separating the arguments addressed to, and valid for, a believer, from the proofs and vindications of Scripture intended to form the belief, or to convict the Infidel. Disc. VI. Pt. IV. p. 325.
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