Various

“ If man, clothed in the thunder of war, is able to strew ruin upon the land, he, militant, by the same power, strews wreck and ruin upon the waters; and so the distinction pretended, whatever it might be worth, fails. And does not the swallowing of the unknelled and uncoffined, which is attributed to the sea as the victor of man, take place as effectually when beak or broadside sends down a ship with her hundreds of souls, when the great sea, willing or unwilling, appears merely as the servile minister of insulting man's hate and fury?
"Alike the Armada's pride and spoils of Trafalgar." ”

“ No Pitt or Cobourg has stood forth to mar, by ensanguined hostility, the bright aurora of her third Revolution. No Louis Philippe has stepped in, to change its character or intercept its consequences, and reap for royalty the fruits of insurrection. No bands of Cossacks or plumed Highlanders have again approached the capital of civilisation, to wrest from Freedom the rights she has acquired, or tear from her brows the glory she has won. Whatever she has gained, or suffered, or lost, has been owing to herself, and herself alone. Europe has looked on in anxious, it may be affrighted, neutrality. ”

“ You have had confided to your administration, by our illustrious sovereign, this most powerful state, of almost unlimited extent and fertility—a people unrivalled in their knowledge, caution, skill, and energy, possessed of unlimited means of creating wealth, and out of all these elements of human happiness your measures have produced a chaos of ruin, misery, and discontent. You can scarcely place your finger on the map, and mark a spot in this vast empire where all the elements of prosperity do not exist abundantly; you cannot point out one where you have not produced results of ruin. ”

“ One curse, and one curse only, has hitherto blasted all their efforts at improvement, and that is, the abuse of freedom. One thing, and one thing only, is required to set them right, and that is, the strong rule suited to national pupilage. One thing, and one thing only, is required to complete their ruin, and that is, repeal and independence. An infallible test will tell us when they have become prepared for self-government, and that is, when they have ceased to hate the Saxon—when they adopt his industry, imitate his habits, and emulate his virtues. ”

“ I was not even certain that Lord Rainsforth's views on politics were the same as mine would be. How could the politics of an experienced man of the world be those of an ardent young student? But had they been identical, I felt that I could not so creep into equality with a patron's daughter. No! I was ready to abandon my own more scholastic predilections—to strain every energy at the bar—to carve, or force my own way to fortune—and, if I arrived at independence, then—what then? why, the right to speak of love, and aim at power. This was not the view of Ellinor Compton. ”

“ Grant for a moment that Man is properly to be viewed as Earth's ravager, not its cultivator, and that "his control stops with the shore," is good English in verse for "his power of desolating, or his range of desolation, is bounded by the sea-shore;" grant for a moment that it is a lawful and just practical contemplation to view him ravaging and ranging up to that edge, and to view in contrast the glad, bright, universally-laughing Ocean beyond—unravaged, unstained, unfooted, no smoke of conflagration rising, only the golden morning mist seeming all one diffused sun. ”

“ It demands of him that he exert himself manfully for that safety of the whole in which he has so much more evident an interest. For, be it known—prescribe whatever remedies you will, political, moral, or religious—that it is by securing a certain indispensable amount of wellbeing to the multitude of mankind that the only security can be found for the social fabric, for life, and property, and civilisation. If men are allowed to sink into a wretchedness that savours of despair, it is in vain that you show them the ruins of the nation, and themselves involved in those ruins. ”

“ Ireland, in reality, is not miserable because she has, but because she has not been conquered; she is suffering under a redundant population, not because the tyranny of England, but the tyranny of her own demagogues, prevents their getting bread; and she is torn with discordant passions, not because British oppression has called them into existence, but because Irish licentiousness has kept them alive for centuries after, under a more rigorous Government, they would have been buried for ever. ”

“ Experience has taught us that we can import twelve millions of grain, a full fifth of the national subsistence, in a single year. But if the currency is not put upon a proper footing, the means of purchasing this grain are taken from the people—their industry is blasted, their labour meets with no reward—and the most numerous and important class in the community come to present the deplorable spectacle of industrious worth perishing of hunger, or worn out by suffering, in the midst of accumulated stores of home-grown or foreign subsistence. ”

“ The Antwerp burghers were not exempt from this horrible curiosity; and Headsman's Acre, as the field was called in which capital punishments then took place, was crowded with spectators of all ages and classes, including women, many of them with their children in their arms, urchins of tender age, and old men who, already on the brink of the grave, tottered from their easy chair and chimney corner to behold a fellow-creature expiate, by a premature death, his sin against society. Noisy and merry was the mob collected round the tall black gallows and the grim rusty wheel. ”

“ Great was the folly, and great the error of indulging imagination that had no basis—of linking the whole usefulness of my life to the will of a human creature like myself. Heaven did not design the passion of love to be this tyrant; nor is it so with the mass and multitude of human life. We dreamers, solitary students like me, or half poets like poor Roland, make our own disease. ”

“ The poet, imbued, as we have seen, with the love of nature and of man, will breathe on both his benediction. He will glorify the Sea. And how does he attain the transported and affectionate contemplation of the abyss of waters? By the opposition of man's impotence to the might of the sea; by the opposition of the land subjected to man, mixed up in his destinies, and changeable with him, to the ocean free from all change, excepting that of its own moods, the free play of its own gigantic will. For though, philosophically speaking, the immense mass of waters is in itself inert and powerless ”

“ Must the utmost amount of products, at all hazard, be obtained, whatever the mode of industry that earn it, or the fate of those called into existence by the overgrown manufacture you encourage? Is it no matter how won, or who enjoys? Is the only question that the wealth be there? What if England, by carrying out, without pause or exception, the doctrine of free-trade, should aggravate the most alarming symptoms of her present social condition—must this law of the political economist be still, with unmitigated strictness, urged upon her? ”

“ Our main quarrel—though we have many—with the political economists is on this ground—that, having constructed a theory explanatory of the wealth of nations, they have wished to enforce this upon our legislature, as if it had embraced all the causes which conspire to the wellbeing of nations; as if wealth and wellbeing were synonymous. Having determined the state of things best fitted to procure, in general, the greatest aggregate amount of riches, they have proceeded to deal with a people as if it were a corporate body, whose sole object was to increase the total amount of its possessions. ”

“ And is this horrible game and triumph of Ocean, which threatened to annihilate the species, upon a sudden confined to "a man overboard?" Or are we to understand that, by a strong feat of uncreating and recreating imagination, this one man, dropped as if naked from the clouds into the sea and submerged, impersonates and impictures, by some concentration of human agony and of human impotence, that universally diffused annihilation of Man in his ships which was the matter in hand? ”

“ The defeats on the Adige, the fall of Milan, the dispersion of the Lombard and Tuscan levies, tell us how miserable was the delusion on which such expectations rested, and how vain is the hope that a selfish and worn-out nation, destitute alike of civil firmness or military courage, can successfully establish its independence. Is it from Rome that this regeneration of society is expected to arise, and the reforming pope who is to be the Peter the Hermit of the new crusade in favour of the liberties of mankind? ”

“ Imagination beholds ten thousand fleets sweeping over the ocean—or a hundred of them, or one—and man's exulting spirit feels that it was not in vain. The purposes for which fleets do sail—to carry commerce, to carry war, to carry colonies, to carry civilisation, to bring home knowledge, have triumphantly prospered; and, of course, are not in the meaning of the poet, although properly they alone are in the meaning of the word. ”

“ What will you require of kindliest humanity from any poet, from any lover of nature, that is not here? The savage grandeur of earth and sea have their peril—the fleeing of human homes and haunts—the voluptuous banishment self-imposed—the caressing of dear fancies in secret invisible recesses inviolable—these tend all to engendering and nurturing an excessive self-delight akin to an usurping self-love ”

“ We have a country here so wealthy, so nearly approaching that state where its accessions of capital can no longer be profitably employed, that it wastes its funds in ruinous speculations, building perhaps useless factories—and, if useless, how mischievous!—that it sends its money abroad to construct foreign railways, or throws it away upon South American republics. Yet the people of this country is degraded and brutalised for want of education, and it is threatened with political convulsions for want of a good system of emigration ”

“ It is quite evident that, if the demagogues would let Ireland alone—if the wounds in her political system were not continually kept open, and the passions of the people incessantly inflamed, by her popular leaders, she would become as rich and prosperous as she is populous—that, instead of a source of weakness, she would become a pillar of strength to the united empire—and instead of being overspread with the most wretched and squalid population in Europe, she might eventually boast of the most contented and happy. ”

“ But the wise men of the island meet and say, Let us learn to make our own cotton into stuff for raiment; so shall we have clothes without parting with our corn and wine. Would the people of the island be very foolish if they consented to wear, for a time, a much coarser raiment, in order that they might practise this new industry, and thus provide themselves with raiment, and keep their provender? We suppose that the same unequal distribution of property is found in our island as in the rest of the world—that there are rich and poor. ”

“ Had land extended around the globe, it had been a belt of desolation encircling the globe. Corn fields, vineyards, trampled under foot of man and horse,—villages, towns, and great cities, reeking with conflagration, like the smoke ascending from some enormous altar of abomination to offend the nostrils of heaven—armed hosts lying trampled in their blood—the unarmed lying scattered every where in theirs; for man has trodden the earth in his rage, and before him was as the garden of Eden, behind him is the desolate wilderness. ”

“ He has generously, honourably, magnanimously, thrown upon the ground the checkered mantle of scorn, anger, disappointment, sorrow, and ennui, which had wrapped in disguise his fair stature and features; and he stands a restored, or at least an escaped man, gazing with eye and soul upon the beautiful and majestic sea rolling in its joy beneath his feet. He looks; and he will deliver himself up, as Nature's lone enthusiast, to the delicious, deep, dread, exulting, holy passion of—vary the word as he varies it—The Ocean. ”

“ Looking at the matter abstractedly from other considerations, what doctrine could be more reasonable or more benign than that which instructs the separate communities of mankind to throw aside all commercial jealousies, all unnecessary heartburnings—to throw down their barriers, their custom-houses, their preventive stations—to let the commerce and industry of the world be free, so that the peace of the world, as well as the wealth of nations, would be secured and advanced? ”

“ Is it any consolation that he bankrupts himself in ruining others, and adding immensely to a pauper population? Commerce free! Good. It will increase your imports, and multiply by an advantageous exchange the products of your industry. But what if your measure to promote this freedom of commerce foster a mode of industry at home essentially of a precarious nature, and attended with fearful political and social dangers, at the expense of other modes of industry of a more permanent, stable, peaceful character—must nothing still be heard of but free commerce? ”