Various

“ It was this peculiarity which led men to segregate Howard from the class to which, by the great elements of his character, he belongs. To relieve the common wants of our humanity was his object—to war against hunger and disease, and unjust cruelties inflicted by man on man, was his chosen task-work; therefore was it vaguely supposed that the sentiment of humanity was his great predominant motive, and that he was driven about the world by compassion and benevolence. ”

“ In Austria a different and more melancholy prospect has been exhibited. That great and noble country has been the victim, not merely of the passions of revolution, but of those of race. It has been torn asunder, not only by the ambition of the revolutionists, and the ardent zeal of a people yet inexperienced in social dissensions sighing after freedom, but by the force and inextinguishable rivalry of different and discordant races. ”

“ After inspecting the jails of England, Scotland, and Ireland, he, in 1775, took the first of those journeys on the Continent, which had, for their sole object, the inspection of prisons. And henceforward, in all his travels, he is so absorbed in this one object, that he pays attention to nothing else. Not the palace, rich with painting and sculpture; not the beautiful hills and valleys—only the prison and the lazaretto can retain him for a moment. Once he is tempted to hear some fine music—it distracts his attention—he foregoes the music. ”

“ Is it not a mockery, then, to tell us that our main stay against foreign competition should depend upon a peculiarly uncertain crop? Will his pointing to a moss of 30 acres in Wigtonshire, convince the farmers of this great kingdom, that their future safety, as a class, must entirely depend upon their cultivating such a root on such a soil, in preference to wheat on the fertile loams of glorious old England? ”

“ If any landowners or tenants are thoroughly persuaded that, under the operation of free trade, land will yield no rent to the owner, or no profit to the farmer, let them dispose of their land or their farms. The whole world lies before them. The funds, the share-market, trades and manufactures innumerable and new ones every day, the colonies, the United States, the Antipodes, Europe, and literally the whole surface of the globe, is open to the enterprise of wealthy or ingenious men. ”

“ It is very easy to be lenient after an insurrection which has been extinguished in a cabbage garden, and rendered the insurgents ridiculous in the eyes of all the world; but what should we have done, and how would we have felt, if Smith O'Brien at the head of the Irish rebels had invaded England, taken London, nourished for a year and a half a frightful civil war in the heart of the empire, and compelled us to call in the legions of France into the midland counties to save the nation from ruin? ”

“ The real Howard, who devoted his life to the jail and the lazaretto, was a very different person from that ideal of benevolence which the verse of Darwin, or the eloquence of Burke, had called up into our minds. Instead of this faint and classic ideal, we have the intensely and somewhat sternly religious man, guided and sustained, every step of his way, not alone, nor principally, by the amiable but vacillating sentiment which passes under the name of philanthropy, but by an exalted, severe, imperative sense of duty. ”

“ But if Austria had been broken up into a Hungarian, a Lombard, and a Bohemian republic, how was such an alliance to be formed? What central power could, in such an event, have existed under such circumstances, to oppose a mid impediment to the grasping ambition of Russia on the one side, and France on the other? Prussia, it is well known, is entirely under the influence of Russia, and does not, except in the first fervour of revolution, venture to deviate from the policy which it prescribes. Sweden and Denmark are mere subsidiary states. ”

“ The same spirit which, in past times, has driven men into the desert, or shut them up in cells with the scourge and the crucifix; the same spirit which has impelled them to brave all the dangers of noxious climates and of savage passions, to extend the knowledge of religion amongst barbarous nations—was animating Howard when he journeyed incessantly from prison to prison, tracking human misery into all its hidden and most loathsome recesses. ”

“ If the first exhibited the whirlwind of anarchy let loose, the second showed the power by which it is restrained; if the former filled every heart with dread at the fierce passions which were developed, and the portentous events which occurred in the world, the latter afforded reason for profound thankfulness, at the silent but irresistible force with which Omnipotence overrules the wickedness of men, and restrains the madness of the people. ”

“ Are we not entitled to demand that the same measure which has been dealt to us, shall be meted out to every man in Great Britain and Ireland, let his trade or occupation be what it may? Are we not entitled to say this much to the manufacturers, who were foremost in the late movement—You have compelled us to compete with Poland for grain on equal terms: you therefore must in future compete with the foreign manufacturer on a similar condition of equality? Why are we to pay fifteen per cent duty for foreign silk manufactures ”

“ Yet when their exploits have rung through all America, it would be absurd to deny that they were excellent irregular troops. Their victories were gained in the teeth of every established precedent of warfare; they were owing to a singular combination of military qualities in the men themselves. Without discipline or a spirit of subordination, they knew how to keep their ranks, and act as one man. Doniphan's regiment marched through New Mexico more like a band of Free Companions than like the paid soldiers of a modern government. ”

“ But that is ever the case with revolutionists. Blinded by the passions with which they are actuated, they rush headlong on their own destruction; and destroy, in their insane ambition, the very bulwarks by which alone durable freedom is to be secured in their own or any other country.
It is commonly thought in this country that the war in Hungary was a contest for national independence, and that it bears a close analogy to the memorable conflicts by which, in former times, the independence of Scotland was maintained, or the liberties of England purchased. ”

“ That agriculturist who should deny the advantages which his own science has derived from the aid of chemistry, would not only be an ungrateful, but an exceedingly unreasonable man; nevertheless, he cannot be charged with either ingratitude or folly if, after calculating the cost of the productive agent, and the value of the produce, he declines to expend his capital in forced improvements, which at the end of the year, and with diminished prices, must leave him a considerable loser. If high farming could be shown to be productive, high farming would be the rule and not the exception. ”

“ What enormous amount of benefit have Manchester manufacturers conferred upon the community at large, that they are to be bolstered up by customs' duties, whilst the agriculturist is trodden under foot? What fractional portion of the greatness of this country has been achieved by the professors of the spinning-jenny and the billy-roller, who now, in defiance of history and of fact, would fain persuade us that THEY, forsooth, are the flower of Britain, the oracles of its wisdom, the regulators of its policy, the masters of the destiny of mankind? ”

“ The revolutionists, indeed, in every country—the Red Republicans in France, the Chartists in England, the Rebels in Ireland, the Carbonari in Italy, the Illuminés in Germany, were perfectly prepared to renew for their own profit the same scenes of spoliation, bloodshed, and massacre. But such extreme characters form, even in the most depraved society, but a small part of the whole inhabitants. It is the delusion or timidity of the great body, not the absolute strength or numbers of the violent party, which is the principal danger. The force of the first Revolution consisted in its novelty ”

“ Poland was overawed by the Colossus of the North; and even the heroic valour of the Magyars, so often in happier days the bulwark of the Cross, had yielded to that loyalty and tenacity of purpose which has so long distinguished the Austrian people, joined and aided by the support which, on this as on many previous occasions, Russia has afforded to the cause of order in Europe. Though last, not least, Great Britain was pacified: the dreams of the Socialists, the treason of the Chartists, had recoiled before the energy of a people yet on the whole loyal and united. ”

“ As for our agricultural labourers, who, we are often told, are the staple of our population, for many years the whole force and pressure of our social institutions has been applied to compel their migration. Landlord, tenant, parson, overseer, and even a man's own fellow-labourers, are all in a conspiracy to elbow him out of the crowd, and the sooner he yields to that pressure the better. Why, then, should it be thought a hard thing to give the same advice to the landowner and the farmer? ”

“ Austria was all but won to the democratic side; Vienna, Prague, and Milan were in the hands of the insurgents. Never, in the darkest periods of the revolutionary war, was Austria in such desperate straits, as when Radetsky retreated behind the Mincio, and the treacherous assault of Charles Albert was aided by the whole strength of revolutionary Italy, and the tacit support or lukewarm indifference of France and England. ”

“ Those who regard an English landlord or yeoman as an animal to be kept in a hothouse will think this very cruel advice, but it is advice which nine-tenths of our fellow-subjects have to follow, at least once in their lives. The law of change is impressed on the whole face of society. Man improves by being transplanted to new soils, and grafted on new stocks. Why should not the heroic qualities of our gentry be employed in the improvement of the world, and in the spread of civilisation, religion, and manners? ”

“ And, without presuming to scan too deeply the intentions of Providence, or the great system by which evil is brought out of good, and an irresistible power says to the madness of the people, as to the storms of the ocean, "Hitherto shalt thou come, and no farther, and here shall thy proud waves be staid," we may probably discover, humanly speaking, the means by which the evil has been arrested. ”

“ It not unfrequently happens that the great men of history, whom we have admired in our youth, sink grievously in our estimation, and lose their heroic port and proportions, when we survey them more nearly, and at a season of maturer judgment. They shrink into the bounds and limits of commonplace mortality. We venture even to administer reproof and castigation, where, perhaps, we had venerated almost to idolatry. Such is not the case with Howard. ”

“ England—that noble country which stands pre-eminent among the nations of the world for its loyalty, enterprise, and independence—for its regard to sterling worth in the lowest, as well as the highest sphere—has awakened from its momentary trance. The voice of the people, before which that of faction must be silenced, is proclaiming, in clear and articulate language, that the virtual possession of its free and unviolated soil shall not be yielded, through fraud, to the foreigner, who never could have taken possession of it by force of arms ”

“ However, he brought us rather more than he bargained for, till the whole blessed jungle seemed to be gathering between us and the boat to pelt us to death with nuts as big as eighteen-pound shot, husks and all; so off we had to hurry into the glare again, Sir Charles half carrying his daughter through guinea-grass up to the waist—when somebody felt the smell of smoke, and next minute we broke out near it, wreathing up white from inside a high bamboo fence, propped up and tied all along with cocoa-nut husk. ”

“ So that, from experience not five years old, we may gather what kind of future competition awaits us, and also what we are annually sacrificing in revenue, by madly abandoning protection. Does any one believe that, in 1845, had there been no duty on foreign corn, wheat would have fallen to 26s., or the foreigner have sold his crop at that price? The remitted duty goes into the pocket of the foreigner, who is selling in the dearest market, and underselling our farmers, as he will be able to do—for he has tested that ability already—down to a point which must extinguish British agriculture. ”