ch have elsewhere impeded
the efforts and destroyed the fruits of industry. While every part of
the Continent, from Moscow to Lisbon, has been the theatre of bloody
and devastating wars, no hostile standard has been seen here but as a
trophy. While revolutions have taken place all around us, our government
has never once been subverted by violence. During more than a hundred
years there has been in our island no tumult of sufficient importance to
be called an insurrection; nor has the law been once borne down either
by popular fury or by regal tyranny: public credit has been held sacred:
the administration of justice has been pure: even in times which might
by Englishmen be justly called evil times, we have enjoyed what almost
every other nation in the world would have considered as an ample
measure of civil and religious freedom. Every man has felt entire
confidence that the state would protect him in the possession of what
had been earned by his diligence and hoarded by his selfdenial. Under
the benignant influence of peace and liberty, science has flourished,
and has been applied to practical purposes on a scale never before
known. The consequence is that a change to which the history of the old
world furnishes no parallel has taken place in our country. Could the
England of 1685 be, by some magical process, set before our eyes,
we should not know one landscape in a hundred or one building in ten
thousand. The country gentleman would not recognise his own fields. The
inhabitant of the town would not recognise his own street. Everything
has been changed, but the great features of nature, and a few
massive and durable works of human art. We might find out Snowdon and
Windermere, the Cheddar Cliffs and Beachy Head. We might find out here
and there a Norman minster, or a castle which witnessed the wars of the
Roses. But, with such rare exceptions, everything would be strange to
us. Many thousands of square miles which are now rich corn land and
meadow, intersected by green hedgerows and dotted with villages and
pleasant country seats, would appear as moors overgrown with furze, or
fens abandoned to wild ducks. We should see straggling huts built of
wood and covered with thatch, where we now see manufacturing towns and
seaports renowned to the farthest ends of the world. The capital itself
would shrink to dimensions not much exceeding those of its present
suburb on the south of the Thames. Not less strange to us would be th