The North British Review

THIS work is the promised sequel to a former one entituled "The Perils of the Nation, an Appeal to the Legislature, the Clergy, and the Higher and Middle Classes."

The author of these volumes has certainly not exaggerated the dangers of the country, however much he may have failed in pointing out the way of escape from them; and with whatever injustice he has assailed both whole classes of men, and even individuals of whom he conceives (though in this too he is sometimes mistaken) that they do not participate in his views. The dogmatism and self-confidence of his manifold denunciations invest him with a certain mimic air of authority, which, we have no doubt, will have an imposing effect on the more ignorant of his readers—while his own ignorance of Political Economy, both in the long-recognized principles and later modifications of the science, is ingeniously made up for by his frequent professions of a wholesale contempt and intolerance for the subject at large. It is a convenient way by which to get rid of such truths and such topics as look hard on the conclusions of an author, thus to proscribe en masse that entire department of human knowledge to which they belong. And yet we cannot see why such matters as Capital and Wages, and Population and Agriculture, must be altogether shunned and abstained from, as if they were not fair or competent objects of investigation, whether with a view to verify all that has been discovered, or to find out all that is discoverable regarding them. They have a substantive reality in the territory of actual and existent things—nor are we able to under

VOL. II. NO. III.

stand why they should be banished from the territory of human thought. But indeed the thing is impossible; and our very author himself finds it to be so. These obnoxious articles come in his way whether he will or not, and the only manner in which he can dispose of them, is by giving his own views regarding them in place of the views of other people. So that, after all, while he often falls foul of Political Economy, as if to exterminate, or to lay a total extinguisher upon the science, he only brushes aside the Political Economy of others, and this to make room for a Political Economy of his own.

Yet amid all the defects and infirmities of this work, we must do homage to its one redeeming property, which is the high place assigned by its author to moral causes, both in the production of the nation's disease, and in the operation of the proposed remedies. It is refreshing to turn from the dry and the hard economics of our heartless utilitarians, and to read anywhere of a universal Christian education, as being, what we indeed hold it to be, the grand restorative from all our social and political disorders. We only wish that our author had written as intelligently as he has written piously; and that he had refrained from certain zealous ebullitions which, besides that the zeal is without knowledge and without discrimination, carry him at times beyond the limits of candour and modesty. Yet it does mitigate the indignancy that might otherwise be felt at his groundless vituperations, that, without charging them either with malice or dishonesty, they seem more like the effusions of a mind blinded by prejudice or by its own misconceptions-though it is infinitely to be regretted, that the sacred cause, whether of religion or humanity, should thus be discredited by a most palpable ignorance both of the science which he presumes to vilify, and of the authors whom he has ventured to arraign. It is assuredly not the way to speed forward the cause of Philanthropy, to place it, as is done here, in a state of violent disjunction from the cause of truth and

reason.

There are certain passages in this work which forcibly remind us of those occasions, when, in virtue of both Science and Scripture having been brought into the false position of a seeming contrariety a seeming, for they never are in real conflict with each other-the result has proved alike injurious to the cause of learning and the cause of sacredness. When Galileo was forced to make his recantations, and on the ground that his discoveries were opposed to the Bible, while we fully sympathize with the eloquent indignation of those who viewed it as an arrest laid on the progress of philosophy, we regard it as a far more grievous and hurtful effect, that the higher reason of the age was placed thereby into an attitude of antipathy and revolt against the au

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The North British Review, Volume 2