Arguing in a Circle
ARGUING IN A CIRCLE.
_________________
THERE was an account in the newspapers the other day
of a fracas in the street, in which a Lord and one or two
Members of Parliament were concerned. It availed them
nought to plead the privilege of Peerage, or to have made
speeches in the House — they were held to bail, like the
vilest of the rabble, and the circumstance was not consi-
dered a very creditable one to come before the public. Ah!
it is that public that is the sad thing. It is the most tre-
mendous ring that ever was formed to see fair play between
man and man; it puts people on their good behaviour imme-
diately; and wherever it exists, there is an end of the airs
and graces which individuals, high in rank, and low in un-
derstanding and morals, may chuse to give themselves.
While the affair is private and can be kept in a corner, per-
sonal fear and favour are the ruling principles, might prevails
over right: but bring it before the world, and truth and jus-
tice stand some chance. The public is too large a body to
be bribed or browbeat. Its voice, deep and loud, quails the
hearts of princes: its breath would make the feather in a
lord’s cap bend and cower before it, if its glance, measuring
the real magnitude of such persons with their lofty, tiptoe,
flaunting pretentions, had not long since taken the feathers
out of their caps. A lord is now dressed (oh! degenerate
world) like any other man; and a watchman will no sooner
let go his grasp of his plain collar than he will that of a
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Commoner or any other man, who has his “fancies and
good-nights.” What a falling off is here from the time when
if a “base cullionly fellow” had dared to lay hands on a
nobleman, on “one of quality,” he would have whipped his
sword out of its scabbard and run him through the body;
the “beggarly, unmannered corse” would have been thrown
into the Thames or the next ditch; and woe to any person
that should have attempted to make a stir in the matter!
“The age of chivalry is gone, that of constables, legislators,
and Grub-street writers, has succeeded, and the glory of
heraldry is extinguished for ever.”
“The melancholy Jacques grieves at that.”
“The melancholy Jacques grieves at that.”
Poor Sir Walter! the times are changed indeed, since a Duke
of Buckingham could send a couple of bullies, equipped in
his livery, with swords and ribbons, to carry off a young lady
from a Peveril of the Peak, by main force, in the face of
day, and yet the bye-standers not dare to interfere, from a
dread of the Duke’s livery and the High Court of Start Cham-
ber! It is no wonder that the present Duke of Buckingham
(the old title new revived) makes speeches in the Upper
House to prove that legitimate monarchs have a right, when-
ever they please, to run their swords through the heart of a
nation and pink the liberties of mankind, thinking if this
doctrine were once fully restored, the old times of his pre-
decessor might come again, —
“New manners and the pomp of elder days!”
It is in tracing the history of private manners that we see
(more than by any thing else) the progress that has been
made in public opinion and political liberty, and that may
be still farther made. No one individual now sets up his
will as higher than the law: no noble Duke or Baron bold
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acts the professed bully or glories in the character of a law-
less ruffian, as a part of the etiquette and privileges of high
rank: no gay, gaudy minion of the court takes the wall of
the passengers, sword in hand, cuts a throat, washes his
white, crimson-spotted hands, and then to dinner with the
king and the ladies. — That is over with us at present; and
while that is the case, Hampden will not have bled in the
field, nor Sydney on the scaffold, in vain! Even the mo-
narch in this country, though he is above the law, is subject
to opinion; “submits,” as Mr. Burke has it, both from choice
and necessity, “to the soft collar of social esteem, and gives
a domination, vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by man-
ners!”
It is this which drives the Despots of the Continent mad,
and makes their nobles and chief vassals league together,
like a herd of tygers, to destroy the example of liberty which
we (the people of England) have set to the rest of the
world. They are afraid that if this example should spread
and things go on much farther in the road they have taken,
they will no longer be able to give their subjects and depen-
dants the knout, to send them to the galleys or a dungeon
without any warrant but their own unbridled will, and that
a lord or a king will be no more above the law than any other
man. Mankind, in short, till lately and except in this coun-
try, were considered as a herd of deer which the privileged
classes were to use for their pleasure, or which they were to
hunt down for spite or sport, as liked them best. That they
should combine together with a knot of obscure philoso-
phers and hair-brained philanthropists, to set up a plea not
to be used at any man’s pleasure, or hunted down like vermin
for any man’s sport, was an insult to be avenged with seas
of blood, an attack upon the foundations of social order, and
the very existence of all law, religion, and morality. In all
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the legitimate governments of Europe there existed, and
there still exist, a number of individuals who were exempted
(by birth and title) from the law, who could offer every affront
to religion, and commit every outrage upon morality with
impunity, with insolence and loud laughter, and who pre-
tended that is asserting this monstruous privilege of theirs to
the very letter, the essence of all law, religion, and morality
considered [consisted]. This was the case in France till the year 1789.
The only law was the will of the rich to insult and harass
the poor, the only religion a superstitious mummery, the
only morality subserviency to the pleasures of the great. In
the mild reign of Louis XV. only, there were fifteen thou-
sand lettres de cachet issued for a number of private, nameless
offences, such as the withholding a wife or daughter from
the embraces of some man of rank, for having formerly re-
ceived favours from a king’s mistress, or writing an epigram
on a Minister of State. It was on the ruins of this flagitious
system (no less despicable than detestable) that the French
Revolution rose; and the towers of the Bastille, as they fell,
announced the proud truth in welcome thunder to the hu-
man race — to all but those who thought they were born, and
who only wished to live, to exercise their sweeping, whole-
sale, ruthless tyranny, or to vent the workings of their petty,
rankling spleen, pride, bigotry, and malice, in endless, tor-
menting details on their fellow-creatures.
It will, I conceive, hereafter be considered as the greatest
enormity in history, the stupidest and the most barefaced
insult that ever was practised on the understandings or the
rights of men, that we should interfere in this quarrel be-
tween liberty and slavery, take the wrong side, and endea-
vour to suppress the natural consequences of that very
example of freedom we had set. That we should do this,
we who had “long insulted the slavery of Europe by the
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loudness of our boasts of freedom,” who had laughed at the
Grand Monarque for the last hundred and fifty years, and
treated his subjects with every indignity, as belonging to an
inferior species to ourselves, for submitting to his cruel and
enervated sway; that the instant they took us at our word
and were willing to break the chains of Popery and Slavery
that we never ceased to taunt them with, we should turn
against them, stand passive by “with jealous leer malign,”
witnessing the machinations of despots to extinguish the
rising liberties of the world, and with the first plausible pre-
text, the first watch-word given (the blow aimed at the head
of a king confederate with the enemies of his country against
its freedom) should join the warwhoop, and continue it loudest
and longest, and never rest, under one hollow, dastard,
loathsome pretence or other, till we had put down “the last
example of democratic rebellion” (we, who are nothing but
rebellion all over, from the crown of the head to the sole of
the foot!) and had restored the doctrine of Divine Right,
that had fallen headless from its throne of Ignorance and
Superstition with the First Charles, long before it was con-
demned to the same fate in the person of the French king;
that we should do this, and be led, urged on to the unhal-
lowed task by a descendant of the House of Brunswick, who
held his crown in contempt of the Stuarts, and grew old,
blind, and crazed in the unsated, undiverted, sacred thirst of
Legitimacy, is a thing that posterity will wonder at. We
pretend to have interfered to put down the horrors of the
French Revolution, when it was our interference (with that
of others) that produced those horrors, of which we were
glad as an excuse to justify our crooked policy and to screen
the insidious, deadly, fatal blow aimed at liberty. No; the
“cause was hearted” in the breasts of those who reign, or
who would reign, in contempt of the people, and with whom
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it rests to make peace or war. Is not the same principle at
work still? What horrors have the Holy ALLIANCE to
plead in vindication of their interference with Spain? They
have not a rag, a thread of all their hideous tissue of sophis-
try and lies to cover “the open and apparent shame” of this
sequel and consistent comment on their former conduct. It
is a naked, barefaced, undisguised attack upon the rights
and liberties of the world: it is putting the thing upon its
true and proper footing — the claim of Kings to hold mankind
as a property in perpetuity. There are no horrors, real or
pretended, to warrant this new outrage on common sense
and human nature. It stands on its own proud basis of in-
justice — it towers and mocks the skies in all the majesty of
regal wrong. “The shame, the blood be upon their heads.”
If there are no horrors ready-made to their hands, they stand
upon their privilege to commit wanton outrage and unquali-
fied aggression; and if by these means they can provoke
horrors, then the last are put first as the most plausible plea,
as a handsome mask and soft lining to the hard gripe and
features of Legitimacy — Religion consecrates, and Loyalty
sanctions the fraud! But, should the scheme fail in spite of
every art and effort, and the wrong they have meditated be
retorted on their own heads, then we shall have, as before an
appeal made to Liberty and Humanity — the motto of despots
will once more be peace on earth and good-will to men — and
we too shall join in the yell of blood and the whine of hu-
manity. We are only waiting for an excuse now — till the
threats and insults and cruelties of insolent invaders call forth
reprisals, and lead to some act of popular fury or national
justice that shall serve as a signal to rouse the torpid spirit of
trade in the city, or to inflame the loyalty of country gen-
tlemen, deaf for the present to all other sounds but that
appaling one of RENT! We must remain neuter while a
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grievous wrong is acting, unless we can get something by
the change, or pick a quarrel with the right. We are peace-
able, politic, when a nation’s liberty only is at stake, but
were it a monarch’s crown that hung tottering in the air,
oh! how soon would a patriot senate and people start out to
avenge the idle cause: a single speech from the throne
would metamorphose us into martyrs of self-interest, saviours
of the world, deliverers of Europe from lawless violence and
unexampled wrong. But here we have no heart to stir, be-
cause the name of liberty alone (without the cant of loyalty)
has lost its magic charm on the ears of Englishmen — im-
potent to save, powerful only to betray and destroy them-
selves and others!
We want a Burke to give the thing a legitimate turn at
present. I am afraid the Editor of the New Times can hardly
supply his place. They could hardly have done before,
without that eloquent apostate, that brilliant sophist, to
throw his pen into the scale against truth and liberty. He
varnished over a bad cause with smooth words, and had
power to “make the worse appear the better reason” — the
devil’s boast! The madness of genius was necessary to se-
cond the madness of a court; his flaming imagination was
the torch that kindled the smouldering fire in the inmost
sanctuary of pride and power, and spread havoc, dismay,
and desolation through the world. The light of his imagi-
nation, sportive, dazzling, beauteous as it seemed, was fol-
lowed by the stroke of death. It so happens that I myself
have played all my life with his forked shafts unhurt, be-
cause I had a metaphysical clue to carry off the noxious
particles, and let them sink into the earth, like drops of
water. But the English nation are not a nation of metaphy-
sicians, or they would have detected, and smiled or wept
over the glittering fallacies of this half-bred reasoner, but,
VOL. II. A A
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at the same time, most accomplished rhetorician that the
world ever saw. But they are perplexed by sophistry, stu-
pified by prejudice, staggered by authority. In the way of
common sense and practical inquiry, they do well enough;
but start a paradox, and they know not what to make of it.
They either turn from it altogether, or, if interest or fear give
them motives to attend to it, are fascinated by it. They
cannot analyze or separate the true from the seeming good.
Mr. Pitt, with his deep-mouthed common-places, was able to
follow in the same track, and fill up the cry; but he could
not have given the tone to political feeling, or led on the
chase with “so musical a discord, such sweet thunder.”
Burke strewed the flowers of his style over the rotten car-
case of corruption, and embalmed it in immortal prose: he
contrived, by the force of artful invective and misapplied
epithets, to persuade the people of England that Liberty
was an illiberal, hollow sound; that humanity was a bar-
barous modern invention, that prejudices were the test of
truth, that reason was a strumpet, and right a fiction. Every
other view of the subject but his (“so well the tempter
glozed”) seemed to be without attraction, elegance, or re-
finement. Politics became poetry in his hands, his sayings
passed like proverbs from mouth to mouth, and his de-
scriptions and similes were admired and repeated by the
fashionable and the fair. Liberty from thenceforward be-
came a low thing: philosophy was a spring-nailed, velvet-
pawed tyger-cat, with green eyes, watching its opportunity
to dart upon its prey: humanity was a lurking assassin.
The emblems of our cardinal and favourite virtues were over-
turned: the whole vocabulary of national watch-words was
inverted or displaced. This was a change indeed in our
style of thinking, more alarming that that in our calendar
formerly: and this change was brought about by Mr. Burke,
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who softened down hard reasons in the crucible of his fancy,
and who gave to his epithets the force of nick-names. Half
the business was done by his description of the Queen of
France. It was an appeal to all women of quality; to all
who were, or would be thought, cavaliers or men of honour;
to all who were admirers of beauty, or rank, or sex. Yet
what it had to do with the question, it would be difficult
to say. If a woman is handsome, it is well: but it is no
reason why she should poison her husband, or betray a
country. If, instead of being young, beautiful, and free of
manners, Marie Antoinette had been old, ugly, and chaste,
all this mischief had been prevented. The author of the
Reflections had seen or dreamt he saw a most delightful
vision sixteen years before, which had thrown his brain into
a ferment; and he was determined to throw his readers and
the world into one too. It was a theme for a copy of verses,
or a romance; not for a work in which the destinies of
mankind were to be weighed. Yet she was the Helen that
opened another Iliad of woes; and the world has paid for
that accursed glance at youthful beauty with rivers of
blood. If there was any one of sufficient genius now to
deck out some Castilian maid, or village girl in the Army
of the Faith, in all the colours of fancy, to reflect her image
in a thousand ages and hearts, making a saint and a martyr
of her; turning loyalty into religion, and the rights and
liberties of the Spanish nation, and of all other nations, into
a mockery, a bye-word, and a bugbear, how soon would
an end be put to Mr. Canning’s present bizarre (almost afraid
to know itself) situation! How gladly he would turn round
on the pivot of his forced neutrality, and put all his droop-
ing tropes and figures on their splendid war-establishment
again!
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Mr. Burke was much of a theatrical man. I do not mean
that his high-wrought enthusiasm or vehemence was not
natural to him; but the direction that he gave to it was
exceedingly capricious and arbitrary. It was for some time
a doubtful question which way he should turn with respect
to the French revolution, whether for or against it. His
pride took the alarm, that so much had been done with
which he had nothing to do, and that a great empire had
been overturned with his favourite engines, wit and elo-
quence, while he had been reforming the “turn-spit of the
king’s kitchen,” in set speeches far superior to the occasion.
Rousseau and the Encyclopædists had lamentably got the
start of him; and he was resolved to drag them back some-
how by the heels, and bring what they had affected to an
untimely end,—
“Undoing all, as all had never been.”
The “Reflections on the French Revolution” was a spiteful
and dastard but too successful attempt to put a spoke in the
wheels of knowledge and progressive civilization, and throw
them back for a century and a half at least. In viewing the
change in the prospects of society, in producing which he
had only a slight and indirect hand by his efforts in the
cause of American freedom, he seemed to say, with Iago in
the play, —
“Though that their joy be joy,
Yet will I contrive
To throw such changes of vexations on it,
As it may lose some colour.”
He went beyond his own most sanguine hopes, but did not
live to witness their final accomplishment, by seeing France
literally “blotted out of the map of Europe.” He died in
the most brilliant part of Buonaparte’s victorious and
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captain-like campaigns in Italy. If it could have been fore-
seen what an “ugly customer” he was likely to prove, the way
would have been to have bribed his vanity (a great deal
stronger than his interest) over to the other side, by asking
his opinion; and, indeed, he has thrown out pretty broad
hints in the early stages of his hostility, and before the unex-
pected success of the French arms, and the whizzing arrows
flung at him by his old friends and new antagonists had
stung him to madness, that the great error of the National
Assembly was in not having consulted able and experienced
heads on this side the water, as to demolish the old, and
constructing the new edifice. If he had been employed to
lay the first stone, or to assist, by an inaugural dissertation,
at the baptism of the new French Constitution, the fabric
of the Revolution would thenceforth have risen, —
“Like an exhalation of rich distilled perfumery,”
without let or molestation from his tongue or pen. But he
was overlooked. He was not called from his closet, or from
his place in the House (where, it must be confessed, he was
out of his place) to “ride in the whirlwind and direct the
storm;” and therefore he tried, like some malicious hag, to
urge the veering gale into a hurricane; to dash the labour-
ing vessel of the state in pieces, and make shipwreck of the
eternal jewel of man’s happiness, which it had on board —
Liberty. The stores of practical and speculative knowledge
which he had been for years collecting and digesting, and
for which he had no use at home, were not called into play
abroad. His genius had hitherto been always too mighty
for the occasion; but here his utmost grasp of intellect
would hardly have been sufficient to grapple with it. What
an opportunity was lost! Something, therefore, was to be
done, to relieve the galling sense of disappointed ambition
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and mortified self-consequence. Our political Busy-body
turned Marplot; and maliciously, and like a felon, strangled
the babe that he was not professionally called in to swaddle,
and dandle, and bring to maturity. He had his revenge:
but so must others have their’s on his memory.
Burke was not an honest man. There was always a dash
of insincerity, a sinister bias in his disposition. We see,
from the Letters that passed between him and his two
brothers, and Barry the painter, that there was constantly
a balancing of self-interest and principle in his mind; a
thanking of God that he was in no danger of yielding to
temptation, yet as if it were a doubtful or ticklish point;
and a patient, pensive expectation of place and emolument,
till he could reconcile it with integrity and fidelity to his
party; which might easily be construed into a queru-
lous hankering after it, and an opinion that this temporary
self-denial implied a considerable sacrifice on his part, or
that he displayed no small share of virtue in not imme-
diately turning knave. All this, if narrowly looked into,
has a very suspicious appearance. Burke, with all his
capricious wildness and flighty impulses, was a self-seeker
and more constant in his enmities than in his friendships.
He bore malice, and did not forgive to the last. His cold,
sullen behaviour to Fox, who shed tears when they had a
quarrel in the House, and his refusal to see him afterwards,
when the latter came to visit him on his death-bed, will for
ever remain a stigma on his memory. He was, however,
punished for his fault. In his latter writings, he complains
bitterly of the solitariness of his old age, and of the absence
of the friends of his youth — whom he had deserted. This
is natural justice, and the tribute due to apostacy. A man
may carry over his own conscience to the side of his vanity
or interest, but he cannot expect, at the same time, to carry
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over along with him all those with whom he has been con-
nected in thought and action, and whose society he will
miss, sooner or later. Mr. Burke could hardly hope to find,
in his casual, awkward, unaccountable intercourse with such
men as Pitt or Dundas, amends for the loss of his old
friends, Fox and Sheridan, to whom he was knit not only
by political ties, but by old habitudes, lengthened recollec-
tions, and a variety of common studies and pursuits. Pitt
was a mere politician; Dundas, a mere worldling. What
would they care about him, and his “winged words”? No
more of talk about the meetings at Sir Joshua’s—the Noctes
cænæque Deûm; about the fine portraits of that great colour-
ist; about Johnson or Goldsmith, or Dunning or Barrè; or
their early speeches; or the trying times in the beginning
of the American war; or the classic taste and free-born
spirit of Greece and Rome; —
“The beautiful was vanish’d, and return’d not.”
Perhaps, indeed, he would wish to forget most of these, as
ungrateful topics; but when a man seeks for repose in
oblivion of himself, he had better seek it, where he will
soonest find it, — in the grave! Whatever the talents, or the
momentary coincidence of opinion of his new allies, there
would be a want of previous sympathy between them. Their
notions would not amalgamate, or they would not be sure
that they did. Every thing would require to be explained,
to be reconciled. There would be none of the freedom of
habitual intimacy. Friendship, like the clothes we wear,
becomes the easier from custom. New friendships do not
sit well on old or middle age. Affection is a science, to
which it is too late to serve an apprenticeship after a certain
period of life. This is the case with all patched-up, con-
ventional intimacies; but it is worse when they are built on
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inveterate hostility and desertion from an opposite party,
where their naturally crude taste is embittered by jealousy
and rankling wounds. We think to exchange old friends
and connections for new ones, and to be received with an
additional welcome for the sacrifice we have made; but we
gain nothing by it but the contempt of those whom we have
left, and the suspicions of those whom we have joined. By
betraying a cause, and turning our backs on a principle, we
forfeit the esteem of the honest, and do not inspire one par-
ticle of confidence or respect in those who may profit by
and pay us for our treachery.
Deserters are never implicitly trusted. There is, besides
the sentiment or general principle of the thing, a practical
reason for this. Their zeal, their eagerness to distinguish
themselves in their new career, makes them rash and extra-
vagant; and not only so, but there is always a leaven of
their old principles remaining behind, which breaks out in
spite of themselves, and which it is difficult for their encou-
ragers and patrons to guard against. This was remarkably
the case with the late Mr. Windham. He was constantly
running a-muck at some question or other, and committing
the Ministers. His old, free-thinking, Opposition habits
returned upon him before he was aware of it; and he was
sure to hazard some paradox, or stickle for some objectionable
point, contrary to the forms of office. The cabinet had con-
templated no such thing. He was accordingly kept in
check, and alarmed the treasury-bench whenever he rose.
He was like a dog that gives mouth before the time, or is
continually running on a stray scent: he was chid and fed!
The same thing is observable in the present Poet-Laureat,
whose jacobinical principles have taken such deep root in
him (intus et in cute) that they break out even in his Court
poems, like “a thick scurf” on loyalty; and he presents
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them unconsciously, as an offering of “sweet-smelling
gums,” at the very foot of the throne. He at present retains
his place apparently on condition of holding his tongue.
He writes such Odes on kings, that it is next to impossible
not to travestie them into lampoons!
The remarks I have made above apply strongly to him
and some of his associates of the Lake School. I fancy he
has felt, as much as any one, the inconvenience of drawing
off from a cause, and that by so doing we leave our oldest
and our best friends behind. There are those among the
favourers and admirers of his youth, whom his dim eyes dis-
cover not, and who do not count his grey hairs. Not one
or two, but more; — men of character and understanding,
who had pledged mutual faith, and drank the cup of freedom
with him, warm from the wine-press, as well as the “dews
of Castilie.” He gave up a principle, and one left him; —
he insulted a feeling, and another fled; — he accepted a
place, and received the congratulations of no one but
Mr. Croker. He looks round for them in vain, with throbbing
heart, (the heart of a poet can never lie still; he should
take the more care what it is that agitates it!) — sees only
the shadows or the carcases of old friendships; or stretches
out his hand to grasp some new patron, and finds that also
cold. If our friends are sometimes accused of short memo-
ries, our enemies make it up by having long ones. We had
better adhere to the first; for we must despair of making
cordial converts of the last. This double desolation is
cheerless, and makes a man bethink himself. We may
make a shift (a shabby one) without our self-respect; but
it will never do to have it followed by the loss of the respect
of those whose opinion we once valued most. We may
tamper with our own consciences; but we feel at a loss
without the testimony of others in our favour, which is
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seldom paid, except to integrity of purpose and principle.
Perhaps, however, Mr. Southey consoles himself for a cer-
tain void without and within, by receiving the compliments
of some Under-graduate of either of our Universities, on his
last article in defence of Rotten Boroughs, in the Quarterly
Review; or of a Dignitary of the Church, on his share in
the Six Acts, and for suggesting to Lord Sidmouth the
propriety of punishing the second conviction for libel with
banishment. We do not know how this may be: but with
us, it would barb the dart.
It would not matter, if these turn-coats were not in such
violent extremes. Between the two, they must be strangely
perplexed in their own minds, and scarcely know what to
make of themselves. They must have singular qualms come
over them at times — the apparitions of former acquaintance
and opinions. If they were contented to correct, to
qualify their youthful extravagances, and to be taught by
experience to steer a middle course, and pay some deference
to the conclusions of others, it would be mighty well; but
this is not their humour. They must be conspicuous, dog-
matical, exclusive, intolerant, on whichever side they are:
the mode may be different, the principle is the same. A
man’s nature does not change, though he may profess dif-
ferent sentiments. A Socinian may become a Calvinist, or
a Whig a Tory; but a bigot is always a bigot; an egotist
never becomes humble. Besides, what excuse has a man,
after thirty, to change about all of a sudden to the very
opposite side? If he is an uneducated man, he may indeed
plead ignorance yesterday of what he has learnt to-day:
but a man of study and reading can’t pretend that a whole
host of arguments has suddenly burst upon him, of which
he never heard before, and that they have upset all his
earlier notions: he must have known them long before, and
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if they made no impression on him then to modify his vio-
lent zeal (supposing them to be right now) it is a sign
either of a disinclination, or of an incapacity, on his part, to
give truth a fair hearing — a bad ground to build his present
dogmatical and infallible tone upon! It is certain, that the
common sense of the world condemns these violent changes
of opinion; and if they do not prove that a man prefers his
convenience to his virtue, they at least show that he prefers
it to his reputation; for he loses his character by them. An
apostate is a name that all men abhor, that no man ever wil-
lingly acknowledges; and the tergiversation which it denotes
is not likely to come into much greater request, till it is no
longer observed that a man seldom changes his principles
except for his interest! Those who go over from the winning
to the losing side, do not incur this appellation; and however
we may count them fools, they can’t be called knaves into
the bargain.
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Ultimo aggiornamento
28.04.2025