Politics & Power Quote by Mercy Otis Warren

Revolutions love to flatter themselves as permanent moral awakenings; Mercy Otis Warren is already calling time on that myth. Writing as a playwright with a patriot's receipts, she frames the American Revolution not as a completed triumph but as a social solvent: it works fast, it dissolves old habits, and in the process it can dissolve the very ideals that made the upheaval feel righteous.

Her phrasing is doing double duty. "Rapid" reads like praise until it becomes an accusation: speed produces "alteration of manners" and a "blending of characters", a line that lands like a worried glance at opportunists, social climbers, and political improvisers flooding into the new order. "New train of ideas" isn't pure Enlightenment sunshine; it's a runaway carriage. The subtext is less "people are thinking freely" than "people are thinking conveniently", swapping principled sacrifice for whatever ideology suits the moment.

Most cutting is her closing move: the principles that once "animated" citizens to "noblest exertions" have been "nearly annihilated". Warren isn't lamenting fatigue; she's diagnosing moral turnover. The revolution created a market for ambition and novelty, and markets rarely protect virtue unless someone insists they must.

Context matters. Warren lived through the shift from wartime unity to postwar factionalism, and she watched the rhetoric of liberty collide with self-interest, class anxiety, and power consolidation. Her intent is corrective: a warning that political independence is easier to win than civic character is to keep, and that the real counterrevolution often arrives wearing the revolution's vocabulary.