Essays moral and political Author:Robert Southey Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ESSAY IX. ON THE MEANS OF IMPROVING THE PEOPLE. The ruin of this kingdom has been predicted by shallow statesmen and malcontents rather more frequently tha... more »n the destruction of the world has been announced by crazy prophets. Yet, because such predictions have proved only the presumptu- ousness and folly, or the malevolence and madness of those by whom they were uttered, nothing could be more illogical than to conclude that the world will hold on its regular course to all eternity, or that the fortune of Great Britain will always bear it triumphantly through all difficulties. The doctrine of climacterical years is justly accounted among the obsolete errors of medicine, yet there are seasons of life wherein the probabilities of disease and death are greater than at others ;.. and so it is in the constitution of society. It cannot, indeed, be foreknown, as in the human constitution, when such seasons are to be expected, but they may be well discerned by a judicious observer when they come ; and he must have observed little, and reflected less, who does not perceive that this is one of those critical seasons,.. perhaps a more momentous onethan that in which the restoration of letters and the invention of printing, the reformation in religion and the discovery of India and America, gave a new impulse to mankind, and affected them more or less throughout the globe. Whether the crisis shall be for evil or for good depends, under Providence, mainly upon ourselves. It must be for great good or for great evil. Let us inquire what may be done toward assisting the benignant indications, and counteracting those of an opposite character. In the progress of that great question, which is at this time before Parliament, it may reasonably be hoped that some radical improvement will be effec...« less