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Untitled Article
tioDj by which , for the l ^ st thirty years , we have By&tepaaticall y demoralized them ; and of which the prime authors and agents have been the unpaid magistracy , who now , because the beerhouses are not under their arbitrary power , have raised a hue and cry against their pretended immorality . When we have
surrounded a whole people with circumstances which , unless they Were angels , must render them immoral ; when , by the administration of the Poor Laws , we have placed them in a position in which none of the ordinary motives to good conduct can act upon them ; when we have deprived them of almost every innocent amusement ; when , by stopping up foot-paths and inclosing
commons , we are every year excluding them more and more even from the beauties of nature ; when , by our savage punishments for killing the game we tempt them with for our amusement , we have made our gaols little better than what the bitter patrician sarcasm of Appius Claudius termed the Roman prisons , the domicilium plebisj when , by whatever we have attempted ,
for them or against them , well meant or ill meant , we have been congtantly labouring to alienate them from us , it is with a good grace , is it not , that , after letting loose the torrent , we attempt to dam it \ ip with a straw ? Make the people dishonest , make them disaffected , and then fancy that dishonesty and disaffection will be at fault for want of a place to meet in ! With one hand turn virtue out of doors , and with the other try to refuse an entrance to vice !
We admit no title in a government like ours , or in higher classes such as ours , to legislate for the morals of the people . They do not know enough of the people . They do not feel enough with the people . Nobody is qualified to be a censor over the morals of persons whose ways of thinking , whose feelings , whose position , whose very means of living and daily occupations , he
does not understand . All the judgments of our higher classes respecting the working people , are made in ignorance of the essential circumstances . Nine out of ten of those judgments , though clothed , even to the parties themselves , with the disguise of morality and conscience , originate in some interest or some fear relating not to those whom they persuade themselves that they are connot to those whom they persuade themselves that they are
concerned for , not to the higher classes themselves . Their attempts to exercise a guardianship over public morals by acts of parliament , always end in some curtailment oT the people ' s liberty , never in any improvement of their morality . Does not even the Chancellor propose , and think himself extremely moderate for proposing no more , that the poor shall be excluded from the pleasures
of social enjoyment , by being prevented from drinking their beer in the only place where they can ever meet for social purp oses , the place where they buy it ? We can conceive few regulations more exasperating , to any population not accuef omed to be trampled on and treated like dirt , than that which Lord Brougham recommend * , and claims credit for having always advocated .
Untitled Article
ftfO Note * en the Nwtpapers .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1834, page 370, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2633/page/58/
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