"An early, good education," says Gray, in his notes on Plato's Republic, "is the best means of turning the eyes of the mind from the darkness and uncertainty of popular opinion, to the clear light of truth. It is the interest of the public neither to suffer unlettered and unphilosophical minds to meddle with government, nor to allow men of knowledge to give themselves up for the whole of life to contemplation; as the first will lack principle to guide them, and others want practice and inclination to business." One might also commend to senators and representatives this sentence from Tacitus: "I speak," he says, "of popular eloquence, the genuine offspring of that licentiousness to which fools and designing men have given the name of liberty. I speak of that bold and turbulent oratory, that inflamer of the people, and constant companion of sedition, that fierce incendiary that knows no compliance, and scorns to temporize,—busy, rash, and arrogant, but, in quiet and well-regulated governments, utterly unknown." Yet I cannot say that I should have written, with my present notion of political or religious obligation, what follows: "Upon the whole, since no man can enjoy a state of calm tranquillity, and, at the same time, raise a great and splendid reputation; to be content with the benefits of the age in which we live, without detracting from our ancestors, is the virtue that best becomes us." The sentiment has a patriotic sound, but conceals the cardinal truth, dear to a patriot, certainly in our times and republic, that a calm tranquillity is hardly compatible with a life of heroic action, and that true progress, so far from detracting from the glory of our ancestors, carries forward that for which they battled and bled, to clothe them and their descendants with a fresher and more enduring fame. Not in imitation of such inflamers of the people, but in the spirit of liberty and loyalty, have Sumner and Phillips won great and splendid reputations, if not silenced the fools and designing men whose bold and turbulent oratory, the genuine offspring of licentiousness, once sounded in our national halls, and came near the separation of our Union.
Whom did the people trust?
Not those, the false confederates of State,
Who laid their country's fortunes desolate;
Plucked her fair ensigns down to seal the black man's fate;
Not these secured their trust.
But they, the generous and the just,
Who, nobly free and truly great,
Served steadfast still the servant race
As masters in the menial's place;