fusion, and the unconcealed jealousies that encompass us we shall need all the courage, all the undivided purpose that the tenacity of mutual love, counsel, and sympathy can bestow.
“We confront a perilous conjuncture. On one side an ambitious emperor, poor, greedy of provinces, and as unscrupulous in his disregard of rights as he is remorseless in his methods of enriching his necessitous family. He cannot acquire for himself a foot of land, but he can confer provinces and dukedoms.
“Having disposed of the greater part of the external Bohemian domain, he now has taken measures to absorb the remainder by the double marriage of his son and daughter to a son and daughter of Bohemia. On the other side weconfront, unhappily, a divided country. Our marriage has already created fierce, jealousies; and men too feeble to govern a county, too uncultured to compose an agricultural report, through their very ignorance of details, are ambitious, of governing a kingdom, solely because they cannot even dream of the minute general knowledge that is required. The more feeble the reason, the more irregular its processes; and the more ignorant of details the more rapidly and presumptuously it leaps into vast generalities that cloud its opaque understanding still more fatally. Persons who cannot compute the simplest problems of calculation, or of ratios, or of proportions, discuss vast millions with the flippancy of vanity and fatuity. Men who can scarcely command intelligence enough to earn a subsistence with the best opportunities, discourse volubly of legislating for the masses.”
