that the present hardships of all classes are owing to the number and amount of PENSIONS and SINE-CURES. Yet from the unprecedented zeal and activity in the education* of the

* With all due humility we contended that the war in question had likewise its golden side. The anomalous occasions and stupendous events of the contest had roused us, like the blast of a trumpet from the clouds; and as many as were capable of thinking were roused to thought. It had forced on the higher and middle classes-say rather on the people at large, as distinguished from the mere populace the home truth, that national honesty and individual safety, private morals and public security, mutually grounded each other, that they were twined at the very root, and could not grow or thrive but in intertwine and we of Great Britain had acquired this instruction without the stupifying influences of terror or actual calamity. Yet that it had operated practically, and in a scale proportional to the magnitude of the occasion, the late and present condition of manners and intellect among the young men at Oxford and Cambridge, the manly sobriety of demeanor, the submission to the routine of study in almost all, and the zeal in the pursuit of knowledge and academic distinction in a large and increasing number, afford a cheering testimony to such as were familiar with the state of the two Universities forty, or even thirty years ago, with the moral contrast which they presented, at the close of the last, and during the former half of the present reign; while a proof of still greater power, and open to the observation of all men, is supplied by the predominent anxiety concerning the education and principles of their children in all the

poor, of the thousands that are inflamed by, and therefore give credit to, these statements, there are few without a child at home, who could prove their impossibility by the first and simplest rules of arithmetic; there is not

respectable classes of the community, and the unexampled sale, in consequence, of the very numerous large and small volumes composed or compiled for the use of parents. Nor here did the salutary influence stop. We had been compelled to know and feel that the times in which we had to act or suffer were the saturnalia of revolution; and fearful evidence had been given us at the cost of our unfortunate neighbours, that a vicious and ignorant population was a magazine of combustibles left roofless, while madmen and incendiaries were letting off their new invented blue lights and fire-rockets in every direction. The wish sprang up and spread throughout England that every Englishman should be able to read his Bible, and have a Bible of his own to read. The general wish organized itself into act and plan: a discovery, the living educt of one great man's genius and benevolence, rendered the execution practicable and even easy; and the god-like idea began and is proceeding to realize itself with a rapidity yet stedfastness which nothing could make possible or credible but such a conviction effected by an experience so strange and awful, and acting on that volunteer spirit, that instinct of fervid yet orderly co-operation, which most of all our honourable characteristics distinguishes, secures, enriches, strengthens and elevates the people of Great Britain. [From an Essay by the Author, published in the Courier, July, 1816.]

suppose

one, perhaps, who taken by himself and in a cooler mood, would stand out against the simple question: whether it was not folly to that the lowness of his wages, or his want of employment could be occasioned by the circumstance, that a sum (the whole of which, as far as it is raised by taxation, cannot take a yearly penny from him) was dispersed and returned into the general circulation by Annuitants of the Treasury instead of Annuitants of the Bank, by John instead of Peter: however blameable the regulation might be in other respects? What then? the hypothesis allows of a continual reference to persons, and to all the uneasy and malignant passions which personalities are of all means the best fitted to awaken. The grief itself, however grinding it may be, is of no avail to this end; it must first be converted into a grievance. Were the audience composed chiefly of the lower Farmers and the Peasantry, the same circumstance would for the same reason have been attributed wholly to the Clergy and the system of TYTHES; as if the corn would be more plentiful if the Farmers paid their whole rent to one man, instead of paying nine parts to the Landlords and the tenth to the Tytheowners! But let the meeting be composed of

the Manufacturing Poor, and then it is the MACHINERY of their Employers that is devoted to destruction: though it would not exceed the truth if I affirmed, that to the use and perfection of this very Machinery the majority of the poor deluded destroyers owe their very existence, owe to it that they ever beheld the light of heaven!

Even so it is with the Capitalists and Storekeepers, who by spreading the dearness of provisions over a larger space and time prevent scarcity from becoming real famine, the frightful lot at certain and not distant intervals of our less commercial forefathers. These men by the mere instinct of self-interest are not alone birds of warning, that prevent waste; but as the raven of Elijah, they bring supplies from afar. But let the incendiary spirit have rendered them birds of ill omen: and it is well if the deluded Malcontents can be restrained from levelling at them missiles more alarming than the curse of the unwise that alighteth not. There be three things (says the wise son of Sirach) that mine heart feareth, the slander of a city, the gathering together of an unruly multitude, and a false accusation: all these are worse than death. But all these are the Arena, and the chosen weapons of

demagogues. Wretches! they would without remorse detract the hope that is the subliming and expanding warmth of public credit, destroy the public credit that is the vital air of national industry, convert obstruction into stagnation, and make grass grow in the exchange and the market-place; if so they might but goad ignorance into riot, and fanaticism into rebellion! They would snatch the last morsel from the poor man's lips to make him curse the Government in his heartalas! to fall at length, either ignominiously beneath the strength of the outraged Law, or (if God in his anger, and for the punishment of general depravity should require a severer and more extensive retribution) to perish still more lamentably among the victims of its weakness.

Thus then, I have answered at large to the first of the three questions proposed as the heads and divisions of this Address. I am well aware that our demagogues are not the only empirics who have tampered with the case. But I felt unwilling to put the mistakes of sciolism, or even those of vanity and self-interest, in the same section with crime and guilt. What is omitted here will find its place elsewhere; the more readily,

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