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    the uneasy class . It is sensible of some oppression which it strives to throw off ; but it knows not what it is . It aims at some distant object which it cannot describe . It complains of abuses and evils , to which it cannot , or dare not apply the remedy . Its wishes are evident , but it wants either wisdom

    or courage to gratify them . It shrinks from the consequences of its awakened energies . Like the blind , when the blessing of sight is given to them , it is pained by the very novelty of its feelings ; it cannot distinguish the relative forms and colours of things . It is for a while bewildered , instead of assisted , and almost imagines that it can walk about in its former darkness more readily than with the light that has beamed upon it .

    It is affected by a thousand vague hopes and foolish fears . It presents an extraordinary intermixture , of new notions and old prejudices , reason and folly , liberality and meanness , pride and slavishness ; greatness in thought , littleness in action ; undue confidence and foolish hesitation ; a love of truth in the theory—a dread of it in the practice ; a knowledge of the right and the doing of the wrong ; abject superstition and absolute scepticism ; the consciousness of a eriant ' s strength ,

    and tlie cunning of a dwarf ' s weakness . For the middle classes also this is the age of transition . They are passing from servitude to freedom ; from ignorance to knowledge ; from being nothing in the state to be almost every thing ; and hence the extremes of the new and the old order of thought ; hence the contrariety of character ; hence the anomalies which alarm many and startle all observers .

    At first it seems strange that any of this great division of society should be found to aid their own oppressors , to rivet their own chains , and , as it were , offer their purses to the plunderers ; that any should , as we have daily experience , oppose the gift of freedom , and sincerely fight the battles of their enemies against themselves . It is natural enough that those who hold unjust privileges and profits should war to the death to maintain them ; but it is most unnatural , that they at whose expense these things are enjoyed , should not only

    consent to give them , but aid the intruders in plundering and subjecting their neighbours . Yet is this anomaly explained by the peculiar character of the age . The old , who love old things from prejudice and habit , —the ignorant , of course , —the selfish , who look only to their own immediate interests in the gratification of wealthy customers or influential friends ; they who cannot , and they who will not think , are yet abounding . Add to these that numerous crowd who are content to be slaves

    to those above them , that they may be tyrauts to those below , and the no less appalling phalanx of the selfish and the proud who can understand nothing but in its relation to self ; who centre nil good in personal good ; who can view the mast of

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    t * % The Signs qf the Times .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1836, page 222, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2656/page/30/