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of rude produce by its extremities; it always can undersell them in manufactures. This simple fact comes in process of time to have a decisive effect upon the policy of governments and the fate of nations.

The consumers in towns, the capitalists who employ labour, see with envious eyes the high price of labour and the necessaries of life-the necessary consequence of the plenty of money-and clamour incessantly for the unlimited introduction of cheap distant grain, and the contraction of the currency, in order to obviate these disadvantages. They would willingly have the wealth in their own hands, which is the growth of ages of prosperous opulence, and purchase subsistence and pay labour at the rate of rude and indigent states. They succeed to a great degree in achieving their objects, by contracting the currency, and forcing free trade upon an old state; but they do so by draining its heart's blood, and prostrating alike its independence and national strength. They lower prices, but it is only by diffusing misery; they pacify for a short time the inhabitants of towns, but it is only by permanently ruining those of the country. In the struggle to maintain the prices of poverty in the midst of riches, industry is blighted, small capitals are destroyed, the value of money rises, while that of labour falls. The nation comes to consist only of overgrown capitalists and indigent multitudes. The indirect taxes levied on the declining fruits of industry cease to be productive, and Government is driven to the last and dire resource of heavy and increasing direct taxation. Capital, alone left to meet the demands of the state, is, as the just retribution for its rapacity, in the end destroyed. Deprived of all the perennial fountains of prosperity and strength, the nation falls under the suicidal acts of its own rulers. They put it to death for fear of its dying. Human ingenuity seeks in vain to escape the operation of the law, which at the appointed season limits the growth and undermines the power of nations. In seeking to avoid Scylla it falls into Charybdis; by ruining the prosperity of others, human selfishness destroys its own. The same law which makes an apple fall to the ground, restrains the planets in their course, and upholds the magnificent fabric of the heavens. Dr Johnson's observation points to a law

which limits the lifetime of nations, restrains the march of conquest, and has for ever rendered universal dominion impossible.

But although, for this reason, it was inevitable that the weakness arising from the prostration of the strength of its central provinces should in the end have destroyed the power, and terminated, if not overturned by actual violence, the existence of the British empire, yet the means of long combating this mortal malady had been given to it by Providence, if they had not been thrown away by the selfish ambition or the blind infatuation of its later rulers. Its vast and growing colonies in every part of the world afforded it the means of counteracting for centuries the decrepitude of age by the vigour and the elasticity of youth. It was inevitable in the days of its maturity that Great Britain should come to depend for the supply of subsistence and the materials of manufactures, in part at least, on distant states—but those distant states might have been its own transmarine possessions. Then prosperity and riches would have reacted incessantly on that of the parent state. The original stock would have been long vivified and invigorated by the growth of its offshoots. But the selfish and suicidal policy which has alienated or ruined our colonies, for the sake of a temporary profit to the dominant urban class at home, has thrown away these advantages, and brought the weakness and difficulties of age upon the state, which still possesses within itself the means of prolonging a respected and prosperous existence.

KARAMSIN'S RUSSIA

[FOREIGN AND COLONIAL REVIEW, JULY 1844]

NEVER was there a more just observation, than that there is no end to authentic history. We shall take the most learned and enthusiastic student of history in the country— one who has spent half his life in reading the annals of human events-and still we are confident that much of what is about to be stated in this article will be new to him. Yet it relates to no inconsiderable state, and is to be found in no obscure writer. It relates to the history of Russia, the greatest and most powerful empire, if we except Great Britain, which exists upon the earth, and with which sometimes in alliance, sometimes in jealousy-we have been almost continually in contact during the last half century. It is to be found in the history of Karamsin, the greatest historian of Russia, who has justly acquired a European reputation; but whose great work, though relating to so interesting a subject, has hitherto, in an unaccountable manner, been neglected in this country.

We complain that there is nothing new in literature— that old ideas are perpetually recurring, and worn-out topics again dressed up in a new garb-that sameness and imitation seem to be irrevocably stamped upon our literature, and the age of original thought, of fresh ideas, and creative genius, has passed away! Rely upon it, the fault is not in the nature of things, but in ourselves. The stock of original ideas, of new thoughts, of fresh images, is not worn out; on the contrary, it has hardly been seriously worked upon by all the previous efforts of mankind. We may say of it, as Newton did of his discoveries in physical science, that "all that he had done seemed like a boy playing on the sea

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shore, finding sometimes a brighter pebble or a smoother shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before him." We complain of sameness of thought, of want of originality in topics, and yet we live in the midst of a boundless profusion of new facts and virgin images, for the first time brought forward by our extended intercourse with all parts of the world, and the heart-stirring events of our political history. There never was a period in the annals of mankind, if we except that of the discovery of America, in which new facts and novel images, and the materials for original thought, were brought with such profusion to the hand of genius; and there never was one in which, in this country at least, so little use was made of them, or in which the public mind seems to revolve so exclusively round one centre, and in one beaten and wellnigh worn-out orbit.

Whence has arisen this strange discrepancy between the profusion with which new materials and fresh objects are brought to hand, and the scanty proportion in which original thought is poured out to the world? The cause is to be found in the impossibility of getting the great majority of men to make the "past or the future predominant over the present." If we add "the absent" to the famous apophthegm of Johnson, we shall have a summary of the principal causes which in ordinary times chain mankind to the concentric circles of established ideas. Amidst common events, and under the influence of no peculiar excitement, men are incapable of extricating themselves from the ocean of habitual thought with which they are surrounded. A few great men may do so, but their ideas produce no impression on the age, and lie wellnigh dormant till they are brought to fructify and spread amidst the turbulence or sufferings of another. Thence the use of periods of suffering or intense excitement to the growth of intellect and the development of truth. The past and the future are then made the present; ages of experience, volumes of speculation, are then concentrated into the passing results of a few years, and thus spread generally throughout mankind. What original thought was evolved in England during the fervour of the Reformation in France during the agonies of the Revolution! Subsequent epochs of ease and peace to each were

but periods of transfer and amplification-of studied imitation and laboured commentary. There has been, there still is, original thought in our age; but it is confined to those whom the agitation of reform roused from the intellectual lethargy with which they were surrounded, and their opinions have not yet come to influence general thought. They will do so in the next generation, and direct the course of legislation in the third. Public opinion, of which so much is said, is nothing but the re-echo of the opinions of the great among our fathers; so slowly, under the wise system of Providence, is truth and improvement let down to a benighted world!

We have been forcibly led to these observations by the study of Karamsin's History of Russia, and the immense stores of new facts and novel ideas which are to be found in a work long accessible in its French translation to all, hardly as yet approached by any. We are accustomed to consider Russia as a country which has only been extricated by the genius of Peter the Great, little more than a century and a half ago, from a state of barbarism, and the annals of which have been lost amidst general ignorance, or are worthy of no regard till they were brought into light by increasing intercourse with the powers of western Europe. Such, we are persuaded, is the belief of ninety-nine out of a hundred, even among learned readers, in every European state; yet we perceive from Karamsin, that Russia is a power which has existed, though with great vicissitudes of fortune, for a thousand years; that Rurick, its founder, was contemporary with Alfred; and that it assailed the Bosphorus and Constantinople in the ninth century, with a force greater than that with which William the Conqueror subverted the Saxon monarchy at Hastings, and more powerful than the armies led against it in after times by the ambition of Catherine or the generals of Nicholas ! What is still more remarkable, the mode of attack adopted by these rude invaders of the Byzantine empire was precisely that which long and dearbought experience, aided by military science, subsequently taught to the Russian generals. Avoiding the waterless and unhealthy plains of Bessarabia and Wallachia, they committed themselves in fearful multitudes to boats, which were wafted down the stream of the Dnieper to the Black

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