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Untitled Article
his claims and his powers , —of the being that partook of their own nature , and who was , therefore , estimated by them as something worth more than mechanism and servitude .
Have we such a man as this among our leaders ? Have we a Milton ? or an Eliot ? or a Harry Vane , —an ultra-enthusiast perhaps , but a man of
great brain , and one of a race of giants . Have we a man in Parliament , or in the press , like Andrew Marvell , who combined in himself the attention
to business of a Hume , the devotion to his constituents of an O'Connell , the seriousness and poetical graces of a Montgomery ( our old brother-reformer of the Sheffield Iris ) , the practical philosophy of a
Fox , the prose-wit and searching objection of a Fonblanque , and the exquisite lampooning faculty of a Moore and a Blanchard ? But the times , it will Ibe argued , are different . Those great men of the former age
iwere bred up in a more awful 33 ense of faiths and duties , — vwrere the giants born of the Reformation , —the children of a mewly awakened sense of the Jlignity of man , walking be" rtween heaven and earth ,
Granted ; but herein lies the very £ 2 j ist of o \ ir lamentation . There ss another awakened sense of ;; bhe dignity or worth of the
imuman being , created by that naew movement of the earth , iihihe French Revolution ; and ornie should think , that this was iiuiufficient to arouse and sustain Jhlie utmost enthusiasm of the
Untitled Article
fellow-beings who undertake to head its offspring . Yet so it is nofc . England is sore and degraded with the consequence
of its endeavours to put down and pay down that movement ; and unfortunately the first utterances of its recovery from the astonishment have been
those , not of the men who have most suffered , nor those who have most sympathised , but of those who have drawn a
problem and a trade , —the codemakers , and the money-makers . Bentham ' s half-philosophy and the shop ' s whole egotism have weakened that cause of
Reform , which originated in the wants of the age , was taken up by Whiggism versus Toryism , and forced upon the Tories by the rick-burnings and the second French Revolution .
Something personal , either in ourselves or in others , is at the bottom of all that is done or thought . There is a man now moving in the ranks of Reform , who has the rare , at present almost the solitary , gift of a
genius for legislation , —Edward Gibbon Wakefield , author of the work entitled ' England and America / and founder of the colony of South Australia . But he , before he had tasted adversity and knew the resources of a mind as robust as
his animal spirits , condescended to borrow a trick from the stage , somewhat too much in the style of the Dioscuri , or the old Sabine story of settlements ; and for that reason his powers in behalf of the many are not to be thought of ! All the
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150 Result of the Elections , and Defects of the Reformers .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 1, 1837, page 150, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1835/page/6/
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