“I am sensible how far I should fall short of effecting all the reformation which reason would suggest and experience approve, were I free to do whatever I thought best,” he wrote.83 “But when we reflect how difficult it is to move or inflect the great machine of society, how impossible to advance the notions of a whole people suddenly to ideal right, we see the wisdom of Solon’s remark that no more good must be attempted than the nation can bear, and that will be chiefly to reform the waste of public money, and thus drive away the vultures who prey on it, and improve some little on old
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