cidedly of opinion, that this tendency is, to the last degree,
disastrous; that it is it which is the cause of the continued depression
of industry, degradation of character, and increase of depravity and
crime, among the people; and that, so great and alarming are these causes
of evil, that, unless they are arrested by a change of opinion among the
influential classes of society, or the good providence of God, they will
infallibly destroy the whole fabric of European civilization, as they did
that of the ancient world. They are, in his own opinion, the more
alarming, that they have sprung, not from the blighting, but the triumph,
of what we call civilization; not from the retention of men in ignorance,
but their advance in knowledge; not from the upholding of restraint, but
its removal. All these, the former evils with which mankind had to
contend, will, in his opinion, yield to the growth of industry and the
progress of knowledge; but in their stead a new set of evils--more
serious, more wide-spread, more irremediable--will rise up, which, to all
appearance, must in the end destroy all the states of modern Europe.
England and France he considers, and probably with reason, as the states
most likely to be the first victims of those social evils, far more
serious and irremediable than any of the political which attract so much
attention, and are the objects of such vehement contention between parties
into which society is divided. England and France are not alone exposed to
the danger; all the other European states are advancing in the same
career, and are threatened, in the end, with the same calamities. England
and France have been the first to be reached, and are now most endangered,
by them, only because they are in advance of the others in the career of
knowledge, freedom, and civilization, and have attained more rapidly than
their neighbours the power and energy by which modern society is
distinguished, and the perils by which it is menaced. In the social evils,
therefore, with which Great Britain is now environed, he sees the
precursor of those which are certainly, at one period or another, to
afflict all Europe; and in the overthrow of our empire, from the corroding
effect of the calamities they will induce, the ultimate destiny of all the
states of modern times.

That these views are melancholy, all will admit; that they are important
if true, none will deny; that they are new, at least in this country, will
be c