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opinion I am ignorant; but this I will assert, that in the observations you have made on the state of the lower orders, you have published as unfounded an aspersion on that large and respectable portion of the people, as any that ever issued from a licentious press. The higher orders too, that class of which (if incompetency to form an adequate conception of the condition of their inferiors be a characteristic attribute) I might conclude you to be a member, will no doubt feel gratified by the compliment you have paid them. They perhaps will esteem it an honor to be told, that they treat their inferiors with habitual reserve and haughtiness. In what corner of the Island have you discovered, that the lower orders are precluded from becoming acquainted with the habits and dispositions of their superiors, and are treated by them with reserve and haughtiness? Is there a nation upon earth, in which so free, so equal, so unreserved an intercourse, so open, so unrestricted a communication, subsists between every order of society, from the monarch on his throne to the peasant in his cottage, as in England ? Are not the pursuits, the connexions, and the in interests every class, inseparably interwoven? The nobleman, and the commoner, the landlord and the tenant, the master and the servant, the rich man and the poor, in the exercise of every moral and religious duty, every act of charity, every friendly office, as neighbours, as brethren, as fellow countrymen, meet together.-In public and in private, in the sports of the field and the amusements of the city, they are side by side. In the exercise of their great constitutional rights and privileges they form one united phalanx. To whatever point pleasure or business, interest or inclination leads, the great man follows with the crowd. No pomp, no pageantry, no external evidence of superiority, attend his progress, to announce his elevated rank, to awe the gazing multitude, or extort a forced obeisance. No hired shouts proclaim his presence, none but the spontaneous effusions of those feelings of popular applause, or popular disapprobation, which his own conduct has called down upon him; and the frequent ebullitions of which sufficiently evince, that the lower orders have at least discernment to distinguish friends from foes. And is this the country of which you would assert that the lower orders are precluded from becoming acquainted with their superiors ? that they regard them as a different race of beings, a worthless set of men, with whom they have no community of interest and feeling? The assertion bears within itself the evidence of its own absurdity, nor needs the aid of argument to refute it. Equally inconsistent, equally unfounded, are your statements with regard to the ignorance and credulity, the prejudice and passion, which you say pervade the great body of the lower orders: equally untrue your assertion, that a very large portion of the lower orders have embraced revolutionary doctrines. How men such as you describe, men who as their hatred is excited or their favor conciliated, reject the most damning proofs and swallow the most monstrous falsehoods, men who are the willing victims of prejudice and passion, could under any circumstances be an honor to their country and to human nature, I confess I am at a loss to discover. But in truth, when you come to speak of the lower orders, there seems to be a more than usual confusion in your ideas, or at least in the terms in which you endeavour to express them. Comprising as the term lower orders when applied to the motley community of the people necessarily must, several distinct and independent classes of the people, classes whose ideas, whose capacities, whose conditions, whose pursuits, and whose designs, are wholly separate, wholly unconnected, and even sometimes at variance with each other, you seem to confound them all in one common mass of ignorance, credulity, prejudice, and passion. That there is in England at this time, that there must be in every country, in the best of times, a numerous body of those abandoned, profligate, and miserable wretches, whom you describe, cannot be denied; but are we to believe, that there are no distinctions between the respective classes of the lower orders? Do prejudice and passion necessarily combine with poverty and ignorance? Are the honest and industrious working classes to be reduced to a common level with those men whose misfortune or whose crime it is, that they have nothing to lose, and every thing to gain by a revolution ? or are the just complaints of the thousands and tens of thousands of poor and ignorant, yet honest and genuine Englishmen, of whom our country still may boast, to be disregarded; and are they themselves to waste away in want and misery, because, forsooth, their murmurs reach the ears of government mingled with the clamors of those crazy politicians, or those designing villains, whose frenzy, or whose criminal ambition, lead them to attack the constitution of their country? Sad indeed would be the situation of the country, were the picture which you have drawn a true and faithful portrait; deplorable its prospects, if the condition of that important body of the people, comprising as it does, the honest and industrious peasant who devotes his life to the pursuits of agriculture, no less than the equally honest and industrious mechanic and manufacturer, were such as you describe. The humble peasant may not perhaps enjoy the benefits of a liberal education, he may even be so ignorant that he scarcely can distinguish between a cabbage and a potatoe, he may be a stranger to the existence of most other countries, (though in what corner of the island it is that you have encountered such excessive ignorance, I stop not to enquire,) yet has Nature given to him those inestimable blessings, reason, common

sense, and a warm and generous heart. The daily laborer may not be competent to comprehend the scheme of government, he may not be able to satisfy himself, why a portion of his scanty pittance is wrested from him in the moment of fruition, to pamper "pensioned merit;" yet can he estimate the merits of a government by its effects. In the enjoyment of the fair produce of his labor in tranquil certainty, and uninterrupted security, he will feel and gratefully acknowledge the blessings of a mild, disinterested, prudent administration; in the continued existence, and increasing force, of many of those causes of discontent to which I have above referred you, he cannot fail to trace the vices of the government; nor, while he is smarting under the practical experience of the miseries to which he is exposed, will he require the aid of that knowledge, of which you suppose him destitute, to discover to him the authors of his sufferings.

But however great may be the existing causes for alarm, it is not from the lower orders in the country that danger can at present be justly apprehended. Scattered through a wide extent of country, they act without concert, without communication. They live in fact, notwithstanding your assertions to the contrary, under the influence of their superiors, who reside among them. Their habits, their connexions, and their occupations, render them naturally peaceful, and averse from riot and confusion. In no one of the late tumultuous proceedings have the country people borne an active part, nor do I believe that a single agricultural district, town, or village, throughout the island, has entertained one serious thought of rebellion or revolution. There is, I am ready to admit, a powerful spirit at work among them. They at this moment groan under a weight of miseries far more burdensome than their affluent superiors can conceive. They strongly feel the wrongs they suffer; they loudly seek redress, and they must be heard; but they demand it lawfully, constitutionally, temperately. Cato it seems has yet to learn, that it is the undoubted birthright of a Briton, an inheritance transmitted from our earliest ancestors to the meanest, the poorest, and the most ignorant man among us, to address, petition, and remonstrate. Ignorant, however, if the lower classes be on other subjects, they can well estimate the value of this important privilege, nor will they scruple to assert it. With respect to another class of the lower orders, the mechanics and manufacturers, their situation does, I confess, afford more ground for alarm; yet even here, the picture you have drawn is far too highly colored. Far the greater part even of this portion of the lower orders consists of men, whose moral, whose political, whose religious principles, no less than their individual interests, forbid them to renounce the wholesome doctrines of loyalty and religion, or embrace those of revolution. Still however it is not to be concealed, that there does exist among them, a formidable band of men, to whom your observations but too justly apply. Confined in large numbers within limited districts, unable to procure employment or subsistence, pining in misery and want, brooding over their own sufferings and the distresses of their neighbours, they are prepared to receive every the worst impression, and become the easy victims and the ready tools, not alone of those, whose ambition or whose avarice ever sets them on the watch to seize an opportunity to involve their country in confusion, but of those still more detested wretches, who make it the business and profit of their lives, first to seduce, and then to betray the deluded men, whom misery and distress have thrown into their power. Formidable, however, as the danger from this quarter is, it is, I trust, as yet limited in means and in extent; it is within the control of the existing laws, if administered with a firm, but temperate and impartial hand; it might be quelled by adopting such a line of policy as might effectually alleviate the distress from which in the first instance it originated, and administering the government with a due regard to the rights of those deluded men. If the minister will listen to their voice, all may yet be well; if not, the consequences may be dreadful: for it cannot but be expected, that men already driven to despair by misery, should be goaded on to madness by the reflection that their sufferings are disregarded-their complaints despised.

I proceed now to the most important topic of your letters; your observations on the liberty of the press. The revolutionary press of the present day is, you say, the prime cause of the rebellious spirit which prevails. It must be scathed by the lightnings of the law, it must be destroyed by the strong arm of power; if the existing laws be not sufficient, subsidiary laws must be created. That the press is licentious to an alarming and unwarrantable extent I fully admit; but that the licentious press is the cause of the existing discontents, or that to restrain and control its licentiousness requires the exercise of any extraordinary powers, I for one totally deny; even though by so doing, I should incur the sentence which Cato has denounced on those who presume to doubt the truth of his omnipotent assertion. In what happy days it was that the laboring classes had no opportunity of getting entangled in politics, no one to form political opinions for them, I am not aware; but if you refer to times when England did not enjoy a free press, you seek the restoration of a system to which no Englishman will submit. If my reading, however, serves me rightly, the village ale-house, the barber's shop, and the church-yard gate, have long been the proverbially noted places of resort in every country village for the knot of village politicians. You assert that a toleration of the present licentiousness must involve the morals, the religion and the government of the country, in one general ruin. I on the other hand assert, not lightly nor without consideration, not on the authority of an Edinburgh Review, but as an historical fact capable of proof, that publications as abusive, blasphemous, seditious, and treasonable, issued from the press, not perhaps in the shape of newspapers, but in the shape of pamphlets and penny publications, and were as freely tolerated, during any given period of the reigns of Queen Anne, George 1st, George 2d, and the early years of George 3rd, as during an equal period of the present times. Do you doubt the truth of the assertion? I refer you for the proof to any of our public libraries. You answer that the libels of those days were not read by the lower orders. It is mere assertion; why were they not read? If the lower orders of the present day be sunk in that degree of abject ignorance which you assert they are, the lower orders in those earlier times were at least as competent to read as those of the present day. Former libels too you say were exclusively directed against one party in favor of another, against measures of policy and men, the present ones against all parties, against laws and institutions. How far these distinctions are correct a reference to the books themselves will show. And yet, Sir, amid all these libels of former times, the country was not involved in ruin, nor the moral and religious feelings of the people impaired. Neither has the licentious press of the present day produced these lamentable effects, Our churches and our chapels increasing in numbers and crowded to excess in every quarterthe societies which have been formed, and the institutions which have been established throughout the country, for extending knowledge and disseminating Christian principles-the knowledge, observation, and experience of every individual attest the truth of my assertion.

It is with pleasure I observe, that even Cato, the man who would wish to stifle every breath of popular feeling, will allow the blessings of a free press, But even this concession you endeavour to qualify and retract. The means of inflicting injury, you say, in every contrivance of human power, are exactly commensurate with those which it possesses for conferring benefits. Well, admit the proposition to be true; does it therefore follow that we should renounce the benefits from an apprehension of the injury? Or may we not devise means at once to control the injurious opera tions of the Press and secure the benefits? That the Press may be an engine mighty for evil I allow. But cannot it, you ask, be made the means of establishing ignorance, and of protecting it from the operations of knowledge, by inelosing it in an impregna

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