Various

“ Fanaticism in religion and politics is still a human instinct—the sleeping volcano in every man's breast, though he knows it not, believes it not. "Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?" Who can answer for himself? It is wiser, far better to bow the head in humility—"Lead us not into temptation." As the times are, as people are, in peace or in suffering, will be their religious hopes or their religious fears—a gloom or a comfort, a wholesome practical virtue or a feverish excitement, a personal selfishness, a frenzy of despair—intolerance and persecution the result. ”

“ Just as liberty was fast dying out of Greece, and the successors of Alexander were founding their monarchies, and Rome was growing up to crush in its iron grasp all states save its own, Plato withdraws his eyes from the world, to open them in his dreamy Atlantis. Just in the grimmest period of English history, with the axe hanging over his head, Sir Thomas More gives you his Utopia. Just when the world is to be the theatre of a new Sesostris, the dreamers of France tell you that the age is too enlightened for war, that man is henceforth to be governed by pure reason, and live in a paradise. ”

“ Take Newton and Milton, Bacon and Descartes, Cervantes and Cicero, and make them walk thirty miles in a wintry day, and come in to a wretched hovel at night, and see what they will desire. Rely upon it, it will be neither philosophy nor poetry, but warmth and food. A good fire and a good supper would attract them from all the works which have rendered their names immortal. Can we expect the great body of mankind to be less under the influence of the imperious demands of our common physical nature than the most gifted of the human race? What do the people constantly ask for? ”

“ Very pretty reading all this to a man like me, Lenny, who can admire and smile at it. But to you, to the man who has to work for his living, to the man who thinks it would be so much more pleasant to live at his ease in a phalanstere than to work eight or ten hours a day; to the man of talent and action and industry, whose future is invested in that tranquillity and order of a state, in which talent and action and industry are a certain capital;—why, Messrs Coutts the great bankers had better encourage a theory to upset the system of banking! ”

“ But it is quite remarkable how strong a faith he has, throughout the whole of his career, in the great fundamental doctrine of religion—a future state of existence. It is no mere doctrinal belief, no dim and shadowy foreboding; it was such a belief as a European has in the existence of the continent of America. No emigrant can have a stronger conviction that he shall reach the new country he has embarked for, or that he shall meet such of his friends as have preceded him on the same voyage, than Southey has in that future world to which we are sailing over the ocean of time. ”

“ Our agriculture has kept pace with this astonishing increase, insomuch that, down to the commencement of five bad years in succession, in 1836, followed by Free Trade in 1842 and 1846, our imports of wheat and flour had sunk to a hundredth-part of the food of our people. At no former period, in England's or the world's history, were such efforts made by energetic and philanthropic individuals to stem the progress of public and private disaster, or such noble and even heroic sacrifices made by the State to assuage, where it was most aggravated, the intensity of private suffering. ”

“ What is still more to the purpose, the griefs and afflictions which we have now to summon up are the same in character as those we continue to feel, and their recollection is but a renewal of suffering. The affliction of the child rarely revives an affliction in the man—very often calls up a smile at the idea that so much distress had been felt at so trivial a cause. This is one reason why childhood appears, in our review of human life, so much happier than any other portion of it. ”

“ The civil troubles of England made our religion, or that which passes for religion among the masses, gloomy and morose on the one hand, and, on the other, an awful conceit of self-righteousness. There was the asceticism of the early ages, but in a new form: there were no deserts, no dens into which fanatics could fly from worldly pleasure: compelled to live in its sight, they persecuted it to the death, and took their own insane pleasure in denying pleasure to others. General distress will naturally engender unwholesome excitement, and it will infect invariably the religious mind. ”

“ Taking the Fine Arts at their lowest value, as a mere source of pleasure, from the love of imitation or representation of agreeable objects—the remembrancer of scenes of interest, the elegant accomplishment by which homes are embellished and made more beautifully homely—surely some little gratitude is due, where it has been the fashion to be sparing of any praise, to those good and pious men who in their convents prepared, improved, and invented colours as well as implements of Art; were themselves the early painters, and by their extensive patronage may be called the Fathers of the Arts. ”

“ There was ambition and avarice—a worldliness, at the instigation of the "Prince of this world," working out a system whose necessities begot the vilest superstitions and idolatries for unholy gain, and disseminated corruption instead of life. The history of the Popes is not the history of the devout and laborious of the monastic orders at all times. They were indeed within the pale of the Church of Rome, for there was then no other; but they who cultivated wastes, taught the people, and preserved and invented arts and literature, were far other men. ”

“ So good, so estimable, so eminent a man as Southey—one whose moral character was perhaps as near to perfection as it is given to humanity to attain, and whose literary works, if not of the very highest order of genius, fall short only when compared with those few which are of the very highest—such a man as Southey, it was not likely we should allow to pass from amongst the living without some tribute bestowed upon his memory, or some attempt made, to appreciate the value of his long and illustrious labours. ”

“ Noble and generous spirits are ye, who, with small care for fame, and little reward from pelf, have opened to the intellects of the poor the portals of wisdom! I honour and revere ye; only do not think ye have done all that is needful. Consider, I pray ye, whether so good a choice from the Tinker's bag would have been made by a boy whom religion had not scared from the Pestilent, and genius had not led to the Self-improving. And Lenny did not wholly escape from the mephitic portions of the motley elements from which his awakening mind drew its nurture. ”

“ It is not the temple but the home is in every man's thought. Let security be removed, our god Mammon be dethroned, and poverty be upon us—not as a vow, but an enforcement of the times—distress bring violence and persecution, and persecution the fever of excitement—the now sleeping capabilities of our nature would be roused to an energy which would make another generation as unlike the present as ours is to that which has been under contemplation. ”

“ It is the steam-engine and the division of labour which have worked this prodigy. They enable a girl or a child, with the aid of machinery, to do the work of a hundred men. They substitute the inanimate spindle for human hands. But there is no steam-engine in agriculture. The spade and the hoe are its spindles, and they must be worked by human hands. Garden cultivation, exclusively done by man, is the perfection of husbandry. By a lasting law of nature, the first and best employment of man is reserved, and for ever reserved, for the human race. ”

“ Whatever disturbs society, yea, even by a causeless panic, much more by an actual struggle, falls first upon the market of labour, and thence affects prejudicially every department of intelligence. In such times the arts are arrested; literature is neglected; people are too busy to read anything save appeals to their passions. And capital, shaken in its sense of security, no longer ventures boldly through the land, calling forth all the energies of toil and enterprise, and extending to every workman his reward. Now, Lenny, take this piece of advice. ”

“ Property in the colonies would double in value every five years, from the joint effect of domestic labour, and the prolific stream of external immigration; and every acre cleared in these fertile wilds would cause a wheel to revolve, or a spindle to move, or a family to be blessed, in the parent state.
We can affix no limits in imagination to what the British Empire might become, or the amount of social and general happiness it might contain, with the physical advantages which nature has given it, and the character which race, and consequent institutions, have impressed upon its inhabitants. ”

“ The rule of St Augustine was the adoption of both. The stricter Benedictine rule, though as we have seen how departed from, enjoined a seclusion from the world. They had, as Mrs Jameson expresses it, "whereever their influence had worked for good, achieved that good by gathering the people to them, not by lowering themselves to the people." The Franciscans and Dominicans, on the contrary, were to mingle with the people, even in all their domestic concerns and affections: they were, in this more intimate connection with the people, to comfort, to exhort, to rebuke. ”

“ The greatness of the Benedictines did not, however, consist either in their agricultural skill, their prodigies of architecture, or their priceless libraries, but in their parentage of countless men and women illustrious for active piety, for wisdom in the government of mankind, for profound learning, and for that contemplative spirit which discovers, within the soul itself, things beyond the limits of the perceptible creation. ”

“ Was each man to be his own tailor, shoemaker, carpenter, &c.? Or was each Pantisocrat to train himself for one special art, to be practised for the benefit of the whole? Or were they to export raw produce, or poetry, the results of their much literary leisure, and so obtain from the old civilised countries the necessary articles for a commodious life? If the last was their plan, their colony, by still being 360 dependent upon other countries, would lose its character as a complete experiment of a new social organisation. ”

“ Government was too glad of an excuse not to interfere: the constantly destitute condition of the Treasury, and the ceaseless clamour against taxation, in consequence of the wasting away of the national resources under the action of Free Trade and a contracted currency, made them too happy of any excuse for avoiding any payments from the public Treasury, even on behalf of the most suffering and destitute of the community. ”

“ Do we not see here the strongest proof of their earnestness, their piety, their charity, and that they were, under Heaven, the ministers of blessings to mankind? There was a period, however, when the entire seclusion of the cloister ceased to be beneficial—the contemplative life must be succeeded by the active. From that period must we date the promise of all that is great and good in art, science, and every effort of human genius, which burst winged out of darkness into day, with the rise of the Mendicant orders. ”

“ A generation sprang up physically predisposed to a sort of morbid exaltation, and powerfully acted on by the revelation of a hitherto unseen, unfelt world of woe. In the words of Scripture 'men could not stop their ears from hearing of blood, nor shut their eyes from seeing of evil.' There was a deep, almost universal, feeling of the pressure and burden of sorrow—an awakening of the conscience to wrong, a blind anxious groping for the right, a sense that what had hitherto sufficed to humanity, would suffice no longer. ”

“ As the deer recoils by instinct from the tiger, as the very look of the scorpion deters you from handling it, though you never saw a scorpion before, so the very first line in some ribald profanity on which the Tinker put his black finger, made Lenny's blood run cold. Safe, too, was the peasant boy from any temptation in works of a gross and licentious nature, not only because of the happy ignorance of his rural life, but because of a more enduring safe-guard—genius! Genius, that, manly, robust, healthful as it be, is long before it lose its instinctive Dorian modesty ”

“ Always was he Robert Southey, and no representative of a party. At one time of his life he contemplated the profession of the law, and studied for the bar. What sort of lawyer he might have made, if he had been able to give up his mind to the study, or what the practice of Westminster Hall might have made of him, there is no saying; but there was never any literary men, earning subsistence by his pen, who had less of the spirit of the retained advocate. A self-willed, untamed, quite individual manner of looking at things, is always breaking out. ”

“ We may have crusades without a Holy Land to recover—as we have had a Bartholomew massacre; we have had, and may have again, in civilised Europe, the political massacres which, in reading history in our closets in our own peaceful homes, we had fondly deemed passed away for ever. ”

“ In the third place, to crown the whole, and as if to put the keystone in the arch of public distress, Free-Trade in every department was forced upon the country by Sir Robert Peel and his successors in 1846, 1847, and 1849, under the dictation of the Manchester school, and to promote the interest of master-manufacturers by lowering the wages of labour and of realised capital, by cheapening the price of everything else, and raising the value of money. ”

“ A new Parliament is summoned, and the members of that Parliament are bound, not more by pledges than by evident considerations of the public welfare, to give a fair trial to the working of the new commercial system. The Cabinet, and the majority of the members of Parliament, believe in the excellence of that system: the minority do not. Time rolls on, and the system develops itself. No attempt is made to impede it: it is left as free as the metal is to run into the mould. ”

“ It would be fairer, speaking of any class of men, to inquire whether they were worse or better than others—a benefit or a plague-spot on society; and it would be fairer to see what efforts they made for their own and for the general improvement, and rather to estimate their success, where few but themselves struggled for amelioration, than to single out every fault, every corruption, and of every age, and to bring the accumulation to bear upon the head, as it were, of one generation. ”

“ In taking it, we should only be following the example of America, Prussia, and nearly all other nations, who levy a duty of 30 per cent on our manufactures, and thereby make us pay half of their taxes. But it is to be feared the mania of Free Trade will prevail over a wise and expedient policy, calculated equally to advance the interests of all classes in the state. We do not say, therefore, that any such system will be adopted; but this we do say, and with these words we nail our colours to the mast,—Protection must be restored, or the British empire will be destroyed. ”