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    true in some instances , but it can only be by the destruction of all the nobler qualities of the human mind , reducing the human being from an active to a passive agent . Were the world to be peopled by such beings , there would be an end to human progression . And whenever a man can be found , who , after being cau ght by man-catchers and forced to work at the trade of bloodshed , can remain contented in such a condition , it would be better for

    the human race that that man should cease to exist . But it is the business of a government to prevent invasion . Granted ; but it does not therefore follow that it is always the business of a people to prevent what a government may choose to call invasion . A people can only be interested in preventing invasion when that invasion is likely to place them in a worse

    position than they were in before . A people might happen to be tyrannized over by a mischievous set of rulers occupied solely in preventing the expansion of the human mind . In such a case almost any invasion must be beneficial in its operation , even though undertaken with unjust motives . At all events it would be a more absurd thing for a people to fig ht in the defence of their own mischievous rulers than it would be to submit to the

    yoke of less mischievous ones . By the teaching of public convulsions the human mind grows stronger ; as has been the casein France and other portions of the continent . I do not hold with the common dogma that a tyrant or tyrants are the more endurable because they happen to be of native growth , and think that a wise Frenchman , or German , or Spaniard , or Italian , is infinitely

    preferable to a foolish Englishman , as a legislator , and , vice versa , that a wise Englishman is preferable to a foolish foreigner . I in no way deny that an invasion is abstractedly a bad thing . I only consider an invasion to be good when it is the means of destroying some greater evil . Thus the invasion of Turkey by the Russians is considered only in the light of an unjust aggression upon

    the sultan ' s rights . But the real question is , would the mass of the people be in a better condition after such an invasion than before ? They undoubtedly would , for , bad as is the Russian mode of rule , it gives more latitude to the developement of the human intellect than that of the Turks does . It appears that there are many national evils which are only capable of being removed from external sources . Mischievous international

    prejudices are amongst the number . It is not by moral precepts that they can be removed , but by the intermingling of the peop le . Peaceable commercial intercourse is the best mode , but in more uncivilized times , paradoxical though it may appear , invasions have been powerful agents , rude but useful . The French and Knglish sentinels were usually on good terms with each other in the Peninsular war , and by no means believed that they were the ' natural enemies' of each other , any more than that they were demons provided with the appendages of tails , as was the

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    288 Civilized Barbarum .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1834, page 288, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2632/page/56/