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like Esau , sell their birthright for a mess of pottage . The power of truth they have sold . The public villain is with them a most honourable gentleman , for his dinner and wine is fresh upon their lips . The stern proud spirit of inflexible honesty has deserted them , and like slaves—base , soulless , craven , reptile slaves—they crouch at their master ' s bidding . They know no independence of spirit , for they have not learned the lesson , that he who expends twenty shillings out of the weekly guinea is a wealthy man , while he who overruns the amount , is doomed to be the pander of whoever will hire him . The former may be the leader of a nation , for he may follow the dictates of his own unbiassed judgment ,
the latter cannot even plant his foot firmly on the surface of the round werld and say , * I am a raanV He is not a man ; he is a slave , as surely , nay more surely , than though -the law had doomed him to bondage . A legal slave may escape , but the slave of his own appetite cannot flee away from the bondage which is of his own creation . Of what avail were all the powers of Sheridan ?
They served only to make him a table-jester , who was suffered to starve , so soon as his parasitic powers were overstrained , and out of request . Had he united honesty and stern stoicism to his talents , he might have led the reptiles upon whom he fawned , as in a dog-leash , but he chose to live a slave to his appetites , and he died an outcast . Indignation chases away pity , while we think of it .
A new standard of public writers must be set up . The mere possession of wit or intellect must be held an insufficient claim to public attention , when unaccompanied by the moral qualities which can alone render wit and intellect of value . Inflexible honesty , severe study , rigid self-denial , philosophic reasoning , and constant earnestness , are the qualities requisite for those who
would change the face of a nation from evil to good . Let those who possess these qualities separate themselves from the herd amidst which they are at present confounded , and , leaving the idol worshippers to their own base pursuits , set themselves up as a band of men not to be turned from their purpose by any obstpcles which may oppose themselves . Let them gird themselves with courage , with high heroic devotion , and chivalrous
ardour , in a * cause , compared with which all the pursuits of heroes in the by-gone times are but as dust in the balance , —the great and holy cause , of endowing human matter with improved minds , the end of which shall be , that misery Avili finally vanish from the earth . Is it nothing , to wield such a power as this ? Is it
nothing , to crush all petty artificial distinctions of society , which are not founded on reason and virtue ? Is it nothing , to beat down the aristocracy of titular rank ? Is it nothing , to beat down the more insolent aristocracy of mushroom wealth ? Is it nothing , by the mere power of words , to crush the mischievous influence arising from the prestige of irresponsible power , and
Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1833, page 309, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2614/page/21/
