"The war," says the speech, "is still unhappily prolonged by that
restless ambition which first excited our enemies to commence it,
and which still continues to disappoint my earnest wishes and diligent
exertions to restore the public tranquillity."
How easy it is to abuse truth and language, when men, by habitual
wickedness, have learned to set justice at defiance. That the very man
who began the war, who with the most sullen insolence refused to
answer, and even to hear the humblest of all petitions, who has
encouraged his officers and his army in the most savage cruelties, and
the most scandalous plunderings, who has stirred up the Indians on one
side, and the negroes on the other, and invoked every aid of hell in
his behalf, should now, with an affected air of pity, turn the
tables from himself, and charge to another the wickedness that is
his own, can only be equalled by the baseness of the heart that
spoke it.
To be nobly wrong is more manly than to be meanly right, is an
expression I once used on a former occasion, and it is equally
applicable now. We feel something like respect for consistency even in
error. We lament the virtue that is debauched into a vice, but the
vice that affects a virtue becomes the more detestable: and amongst
the various assumptions of character, which hypocrisy has taught,
and men have practised, there is none that raises a higher relish of
disgust, than to see disappointed inveteracy twisting itself, by the
most visible falsehoods, into an appearance of piety which it has no
pretensions to.
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