Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/204

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well-fed victims of the charms of the Bourbons, now make, nestling under their laurels in the stye of Corruption, and sunk in torpid repose (from which they do not like to be disturbed by calling on their former names or professions), in lazy sinecures and good warm births! Such is the history and mystery of literary patriotism and prostitution for the last twenty years.—Power is subject to none of these disadvantages. It is one and indivisible; it is self-centered, self-willed, incorrigible, inaccessible to temptation or entreaty; interest is on its side, passion is on its side, prejudice is on its side, the name of religion is on its side; the qualms of conscience it is not subject to, for it is iron-nerved; humanity it is proof against, for it sets itself up above humanity; reason it does not hearken to, except that reason which panders to its will and flatters its pride. It pursues its steady way, its undeviating everlasting course, "unslacked of motion," like that foul Indian idol, the Jaggernaut, and crushes poor upstart poets, patriots, and philosophers (the beings of an hour) and the successive never-ending generations of fools and knaves, beneath its feet; and mankind bow their willing necks to the yoke, and eagerly consign their children and their children's children to be torn in pieces by its scythe, or trampled to death by the gay, gaudy, painted, blood-stained wheels of the grim idol of power!

Such is the state of the Eastern world, where the inherent baseness of man's nature, and his tendency to social order, to tyrannize and to be tyrannized over, has had full time to develope itself. Our turn seems next. We are but just setting out, it is true, in this bye-nook and corner of the world—but just recovering from the effects of the Revolution of 1688, and the defeated Rebellions of the years 1715 and 1745, but we need hardly despair under the auspices of the Editor of The Times, and with the example of the defeat "of the last successful instance of a democratic rebellion," by the second restoration of the Bourbons, before our eyes and close under our noses. Mr. Owen may think