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our children shiver in their beds . Let us pull them down altogether , and build them up anew . '— ' Nay ! not so ! ' drawls forth the moderate Whig . ' In that rickety old hovel were born my fathers and my grandfathers ; so was I too ; how then can I
destroy it ?'— ' And for that mawkish reason must your family be crushed by its ruins ? ' urges the other . — Heaven forbid V ejaculates the driveller . ' Can it not be mended ?'— « It were idle to attempt it / is the reply—' There is no soundness through the whole of it , the new work would but the sooner pull down the old . '
And does the dotard loiter still ? Ay , and ever will , unless driven by main force to the working out of his own safety . The moderate Whig condemns precipitate actions , and defends his folly by quoting the delays of Fabius . But he forgets that the Koman general employed the dread enemy , procrastination , only against his enemies . He of whom we treat , idles away time to his own and to his country ' s ruin .
The moderate Whig is a braggart as well as a coward . He feeds his own self-sufficiency by censures upon the conduct of his opponents , and is weak enough to imagine that , thereby , he assists those whom he speciously calls his friends . Hear how he rates the Tories ., only more hurtful than himself because more active ! Will he never learu that the apathy of virtue encourages vice , and that the success of pernicious machinations is but the result of
his own sluggishness ? No theory in the world , merely as such , can compensate , by its intrinsic excellence , the want of practical benefit . And yet the moderate Whig fancies , that his ambiguous intentions are exempted from the laws to which all abstract matters are subject . Grant even that his views are sincerely patriotic ,
and his plans calculated , as far as they go , to promote the good of the commonwealth . Still , nothing but a prompt application of active measures can bring them to bear successfully and in season . However he may , in his conscience , recognise this principle , the moderate Whig is unable to act upon it . He overlooks the seedtime , and expects a harvest .
Would that it might be reasonably hoped that this hybrid race of politicians might perish without leaving descendants ! Nature has wisely ordained , that those of her creatures , whose existence is a deviation from her ordinary scheme , should be incapable of propagating their species . But for this salutary regulation of a wise providence , the fair face of our globe would
long , ere this , have been overrun by foul and portentous beings . Though the political world has copied , frequently , and with . an unsparing hand , the but occasional freaks of its more exalted prototype , it may be doubted whether any similar check has been imposed upon her reiterated vagaries . Let us trust , that , at length , though late , it may awaken to a sense of its deformed and blemished state , and that , removing that class of its inhabitants
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The Moderate Whig . 853
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No . 84 . 3 P
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Dec. 2, 1833, page 853, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2628/page/49/
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