thrilling by the reminiscences they awaken and the consequences to which they lead. And such is history, such is humanity, such is the survey of our own position, and the great facts of our race; we read the sybil pages, we walk amidst ruins, the most memorable spots of departed renown, the most famous repositories of the valour and intelligence of other times. Of a hundred people who visit a ruin, probably ninety-nine will think it pretty, and will take some chaise, when the moon is at its height, to gaze in company upon it, it may be, participate in a feeling, but from which they derive no lesson; and of a hundred who read history, ninetynine read it as another novel, deriving nothing from it more than the pretty incident, the coincidence, the interesting character, the involuted plot. And is this all? Or what is history? What is the philosophy of society? Can any thing be derived from it? Great lessons for humanity. If anything can be gained from history, it is this, that moral philosophy is an inductive science too, that it deals in causation and sequence, and that although it may be, from the subtlety of its facts, more intricate than other sciences, yet there is as sure a certainty about it as about any other. The great lesson of history is law, order, development; reading this in the solemn archives of past times, we are encouraged for the present and the future; not, indeed, that in the great actors of the globe we see only the puppets of necessity and fatalism; as little do we read this as that other lesson which some have learned from the aberrations of the human intellect-that we are surrounded only by accident and chance. From all our knowledge of human consciousness; from all the thrones of past and present empire, this lesson is one of the most obvious, that, while man the king, and man the beggar, is left to the free exercise of his own will-will to which only the most intelligent reason and the strongest motive are legislators-there is a power that guides and disposes every event as it transpires, combines and arranges, so that in the end the most unlikely means become the very means best adapted to aid the progress of the human family, and to assist in the amelioration of the sorrows of the globe, and to make a social wrong-doing a stepping-stone to a wider and more positive right. CHAPTER VI. THE SINS OF THE PEOPLE. PROLOGUES OF QUOTATIONS. "On the other hand be this conceded: Where thou findest a lie that is oppressing thee, extinguish it. Lies exist there only to be extinguished; they wait and cry earnestly for extinction. Think well meanwhile in what spirit thou wilt do it: not with hatred, with headlong selfish violence, but in clearness of heart, with holy zeal, gently, almost with pity. Thou would'st not replace such extinct lie by a new lie, which a new injustice of thy own were; the parent of still other lies? Whereby the latter end of that business were worse than the beginning." THOMAS CARLYLE. "Though almost perishing with thirst, we should dash to the earth a goblet of wine in which we had seen a poison infused, though the poison were without taste or odour, or even added to the pleasures of both. Are not all our vices equally inapt to the universal end of human actions-the satisfaction of the agent? Are not their pleasures equally disproportionate to the after harm? Why are men the dupes of the present moment? Evidently because the conceptions are indistinct in the one case and vivid in the other; because all confused conceptions render us restless; and because restlessness can drive us to vices that promise no enjoyment, no, not even the cessation of that restlessness. This is indeed the dread punishment attached by nature to habitual vice, that its impulses wax as its motions wane." COLERIDGE. CHAPTER VI. Sins the Authors of Wrongs-The Essentials of Social Elevation-Mistakes-Intemperance-Old English Inns -Dr. Southey-Striking Facts-Coleridge's Fable of the Golden Age-Prevalence of Intemperance Servility of the People The Facilities of Servility-Life of a Spitalfields weaver-Absence of Political Independence-Improvidence Testimony of Thomas Beggs-Pawnbroking -Illustrations of Independence-Dame StradwickBritton Abbot James Austin-Sarah and Mary Spencer -The Lesson of Accumulation. BUT there is no truth more certain and absolutely fixed, than that the wrongs of any nation, men, or man in the world, is the inevitable result of wrong-doing; the people are the authors of their own debasement and prostration, for all degradation and suffering has a moral cause and origin; our physical wretchedness is born of our spiritual. No truth is more certain than this, that all elevation and depression is from within the sap is in the soul; if you give to a man a right and happy soul, he will soon find himself a right and happy body. Is it not true, that the secret of our misery is, that we have, as Carlyle says, "forgotten God?" Our spiritual condition is diseased. And oh, what a life we have led, my brothers! What a life! Our transgressions glare out upon us, and still we do not believe we have sinned. All this cant, and sham, and falsehood, and fudge, all |