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Take care always to form your establishment so

much within your income as to leave a sufficient fund for unexpected contingencies and a prudent liberality. There is hardly a year, in any man's life, in which a small sum of ready money may not be employed to great advantage.


POLITICAL MAXIMS FROM CARDINAL DE RETZ.[1]

It is often madness to engage in a conspiracy; but nothing is so effectual to bring people afterward to their senses, at least for a time. As in such undertakings, the danger subsists, even after the business is over; this obliges to be prudent and circumspect in the succeeding moments.

2. A middling understanding, being susceptible of unjust suspicions, is consequently, of all characters, the least fit to head a faction; as the most indispensable qualification in such a chief is to suppress, in many occasions, and to conceal in all, even the best grounded suspicions.

  1. ↑ Upon the back of the original is written, in Mr. Stanhope's hand, "Excellent Maxims, but more calculated for the meridian of France or Spain than of England."
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