38
ter, will a gigantic foreign power be so terrified, "that it dare not fight in defence of its just rights?" When a blast of ram's horns in our senate chamber, will throw down the ramparts of Quebec, it will do for our swelling patriots to talk of wars as figures of speech—but till that millenium of fools comes, it will be better for us to keep our patriotic gas, where we keep our other superfluities.
But the most mournful influences of these national sophisms, is exhibited in their effects upon the national genius. Our statesmen, (or the substitutes for them ) accustomed to take sophism for truth, will consequently prefer fiction to fact. They would provoke a war on the supposition, that great bravery ascribed to our cadets in a novel, would enable our armies to gain a decisive victory over an enemy in the field. As a belief in a sophism, adds a minus quantity to our ideas, and in fact procures an increase of ignorance and not knowledge, so trust in any conclusion drawn from similar premises, increases our weakness, not our strength. Yet placing confidence in such premises, our substitutes for statesmen, would provoke a contest in the department of arms with a nation, when the chances of success are to the chances of defeat, in about the same ratio that accompanies the efforts of our writers, to maintain against the same nation, a literary supremacy. My fears as to the result, are neutralized only by my trust in the goodness of Divine providence; that the same invariable sequense which follows the logic of the ostrich, when it reasons itself into a belief, that shutting its own eyes seals up the vision of its pursuer; will not follow the parallel logic of our government. "The British Government dare not fight in defence of its just rights!!!" I trust that government has too much magnanimity, to take offence at what our lunatics say.
If I have succeeded in showing that the statements in the Declaration of Independence, purporting to be self-evident truths, are self-destroying sophisms—that men are not created equal, so far as we have any means of knowing—that they are not endowed by their Creator with any stronger right to life than to death; and that they cannot be endowed with any right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, because such endowments would nullify themselves; if I have succeeded in all this, I would not have the friends
