Various

“ We know nothing of mischief in their history, have no record of former doings, that should lead us to dread their principles. But to return to the Papacy: it stands apart from every religion, in its abhorrence, intolerance, and persecution of all that is not of itself. It will never cease to strive openly if it can, if not secretly, to subvert every other—to set up its own absolute authority. Persecution is its law, its creed, its necessity. Where it is quiet, it is undermining; where it is visibly active, it sows dissensions and rebellions, because they promote its own supremacy ”

“ This is exactly the sort of disenchantment in store for those Frenchmen who, after picturing to themselves the United States as a democratic Utopia, the very paradise of the worshippers of Liberty, have occasion to visit the unseen land of their affections. On arrival in the States, nineteen out of twenty of them find themselves about as comfortable as a cat in a kennel of terriers. They are not spitefully worried, certainly, but unintentionally they are most awfully annoyed. In fact, no two characters can be more antagonistic than those of the Frenchman and American. ”

“ When they hear of the Papal Aggression, they ask, When was the Papacy not an aggression? Neither are we very desirous to treat minutely of the Romish corruptions and apostacies, excepting where they evolve principles that will not amalgamate with any civil polity, or the laws and governments of nations. It is possible there may be religions that, being tolerated, would in practice not only destroy every other, but the very name of liberty. Even Thuggism professes to be a religion, and secret murder its duty. Would it be religious liberty to tolerate the Suttees and Juggernauts of India? ”

“ Protection to Native Industry in all its branches—agricultural, manufacturing, and colonial—was the principle which had banded the majority together; and the victory was so great, the bond which united them so strong, that, for this generation at least, all attempts, by external aggression, to shake their government must have proved nugatory. England was once again united: the great cause of domestic industry of the universal people had triumphed. ”

“ We require, of all things, a new hand with gentlemanly manners, an easy address, some flow of language, and a slight dash of humour—one who will not weary the House with interminable statistics, or get into a passion because he is contradicted, or fasten upon his opponent with the brute ferocity of a bull-dog. We want some fellow not fully committed to Free Trade, who can keep, as it were, on our flanks, and amuse the enemy at times by suggesting articles of condition. He must have no one-sided predilections, no abstract preference for the Cottonocracy over the other interests of Britain. ”

“ Is it to be borne, that a cardinal legate, whom existing laws exclude, should be allowed to organise a conspiracy of priests, all, not only virtually, but in word and deed, abnegating allegiance to their lawful sovereign? It is their business, it is in their bond, to persecute the majority of their countrymen as heretics, and to effect in the British dominions as much evil as shall so weaken their country as to make her unable to resist the foreign usurpation of their Pope, or even those of our enemies with whom he may be in league. ”

“ But in a literary aspect the poems of Virgil better demonstrate, than the professional writers just named, how deeply the love of agriculture was cherished by the finest intellects of classic antiquity. In the most original productions of his immortal muse, Virgil has embellished with the charms of divine poesy the arts of rural economy, and the habits of rural life. What other toil of weary mortals has genius enshrined in imperishable verse? Nay, what other industrial calling could wake the inspirations of genius? ”

“ He was still in the prime of life, at the age when man is usually the most social—when the acquaintances of youth have ripened into friendship, and a personage of some rank and fortune has become a well-known feature in the mobile face of society. But though, when his contemporaries were boys scarce at college, this gentleman had blazed foremost amongst the princes of fashion, and though he had all the qualities of nature and circumstance which either retain fashion to the last, or exchange its false celebrity for a graver repute, he stood as a stranger in that throng of his countrymen. ”

“ A few, indeed are so infantine that one is ashamed to be their toy; but most are so knowing that one is a fool to be their dupe. The first, if they condescend to love you, love you as the biggest doll they have yet dandled, and for a doll's good qualities—your pretty blue eyes, and your exquisite millinery. The last, if they prudently accept you, do so on algebraical principles; you are but the X or the Y that represents a certain aggregate of goods matrimonial—pedigree, title, rent-roll, diamonds, pin-money, opera-box. ”

“ Lavish and luxurious in dress, the Havanese lady does not long retain the fresh and delicate tissues that drape her slender person, but transfers them, often scarcely worn, to her black waiting-maids, who turn out upon the Sunday, like so many African princesses, in all the glory of satin shoes, lace mantilla, and muslin robes. At the Havana, as at New Orleans, and even to a still greater extent, the lot of the domestic slaves might be envied, as far as material comforts go, by most of the lower classes of free Europeans. ”

“ Europe, to him, is thrice-trodden ground, and Asia bears the print of his foot. His travels are reckoned by thousands of leagues, his writings by dozens of volumes. No wonder that his erratic tastes have at last driven him across the Atlantic. There he adheres to his magnificent contempt of space. His is no limited excursion to Boston and New York, Washington and New Orleans: the St Lawrence and the Mississippi are boundaries too narrow for his aspiring soul and many-leagued boots. One vast continent is insufficient to satisfy his craving after locomotion. ”

“ But to live with peace, to live with dignity, to live with freedom, to live in harmony with your thoughts, your habits, your aspirations—and 544 this in the perpetual companionship of a person to whom you have given the power to wound your peace, to assail your dignity, to cripple your freedom, to jar on each thought and each habit, and bring you down to the meanest details of earth, when you invite her, poor soul, to soar to the spheres—that makes the to be, or not to be, which is the question. ”

“ There never was a juncture, we venture to assert, in the history of British husbandry, that so loudly demanded the publication of a work on agriculture at once copious and minute in its scientific details—fully up to the mark of modern improvement—incorporating everything old and new likely to throw light upon the subject—and detailing faithfully the latest experiments and discoveries of chemical, physiological, and mechanical science; and we can honestly congratulate the British agriculturist, 591 that, in the new edition of Mr Stephens' Book of the Farm, he truly possesses such a work. ”

“ They have not, like the soldiers of Suwarrow and Alexander, conquered a valiant reputation upon the chief battle-fields of Europe. Neither have they the literature of Russia, so artless in its popular poetry, so original in the compositions of Pushkin and Gogol. But little do they care what exists in other countries. They have the happiness to believe all other nations very inferior to them, and all the imagination that the perpetual use of figures has left them is agreeably employed in raising the airy edifice of their glory. ”

“ It is now abundantly proved that the agitation flowing from agricultural distress cannot be sopited by burning eloquence, or brilliant sneers, or sharp antitheses, or bold paradoxes; and the time would seem to have arrived when it becomes those whose duty it is to instruct others, and to consult for the good of the State, to inform themselves accurately on a branch of national industry so engrossing public attention, and to weigh maturely and impartially the infinitely momentous and vastly complicated interests involved in the prosperity or decline of British husbandry. ”

“ Is Sir James Graham serious in thinking that the prosperity of our domestic agriculture is to be recovered or maintained by "retired shopkeepers,"—that is, by men unbred to the business, strangers to its duties, and, of necessity, utterly destitute of any practical knowledge of agriculture? Mr Stephens anxiously prescribes a course of careful study and practice to his agricultural pupil; but Sir James Graham can, with his wand, metamorphose retired shopkeepers into extempore farmers. ”

“ Let us ask who are "rebels against his said Lord." Is it without design that the Papacy, which weighs nicely the force of words, in the recent brief speaks, not of the British Empire, but the "Kingdom of England?" Is no recognition intended of his claim to the disposal of the Kingdom of England, once surrendered to him? Does he not look upon all the Queen's subjects in England as rebels to him, "their Lord?" Can, we ask, a bishop taking this oath, and obeying its imperial mandates, and going to the "Roman Council," be said to owe any allegiance to his own lawful sovereign in England? ”

“ How many are the honest Germans, who, after cursing the rudeness of American manners, and bitterly regretting their good kindly Germany, have come at last to stick their hat, Yankee fashion, on the back of their head, to stiffen themselves, like the Yankee, in a coat buttoned up to the chin, to disdain all the rules of European courtesy, and to use no other language but the consecrated dialect of business. ”

“ When the two halves of this immense country shall have taken a greater development, when each of them shall have grown strong enough to need no longer the other's support, the consciousness of its power will give keenness to its susceptibilities, and it will repel with anger what it now with difficulty tolerates. A fortuitous circumstance will cause a long-repressed animosity to burst forth; and slavery is, perhaps, the straw that shall break the steel bar of the United States. ”

“ The reimposition of the Income Tax for three years is an immense point in our favour. I never felt so nervous in my life as during the Ministerial crisis, when it appeared possible that Stanley might come in. I knew that, if he succeeded in forming a Government, the Income Tax was doomed, and then, of course, we must have had a revision of the tariff; and probably he would have proposed to levy such duties upon imports as might put the British artisan, labourer, and grower, on a fair level to compete with the foreigner, at least in respect of taxation. ”

“ The fact that the agricultural labourers are not universally in distress is undoubtedly blinding many honest men to the real position of the country, while it is enabling Parliamentary orators, and Whig snipper-snappers from the hustings, to point to the present comfort of this class as a proof of the success of the Free-trade policy. But can these gentlemen be honest? Upon what principle of political economy or common sense can the farm-labourer continue to receive the same wages as formerly, when the value of the produce of his labour is reduced one-third? ”

“ The American atmosphere envelopes them, and by its constant action weakens their recollections, dissolves their prejudices, decomposes their primitive elements. Little by little, by insensible modifications, they change their views and mode of living, adopt the usages and language of the Americans, and end by being absorbed in the American nation, as are the streamlets from the valleys in the great rivers that bear them onward to the ocean. ”

“ Unless our mind be absorbed in the movements of a high-pressure steam-engine, and our heart changed into a bank-note, there will always remain to us pleasing reveries, thoughts of art and poetry, the enjoyments of social life and of expansive affections, which all the efforts of your courage and the success of your toil can never replace. ”