interest. That they are "important if true," as the Americans say, no one
will deny: that they are of immediate and pressing application to the
state of society in the British islands, none acquainted with it,
especially in the manufacturing districts, will be so bold as to dispute.
We have deemed it best to give an abstract of his opinions and principles
in a condensed form, in preference to quoting individual passages, because
he expands his ideas so much, that the latter course would have enabled us
to give only a limited number of his views. Those who will take the
trouble to turn to the original volumes, will find every sentence in the
preceding abstract enforced and illustrated at least a dozen times in this
most able and original work. That we consider his ideas as in the main
just, and his anticipations too likely to prove well-founded, may be
inferred from the pains we have taken to form a digest of them in the
preceding pages. We only hope that, though he possibly has not much
exaggerated the social evils which now threaten society, he has not given
their due weight to the many alleviating or corrective causes which, in a
free, religious, and moral community, are constantly called into activity
when society has come to require their operation. Sismondi says, though he
has been enforcing these principles for twenty years, he has found few
converts to his opinion in France; and that he does not think he would
have found one, if the English Parliamentary Reports had not afforded
decisive evidence of the existence of many of these social evils amidst
unbounded commercial prosperity and the highest political power in Great
Britain. The social evils which destroyed Rome, he reminds us, were in
full activity during the eighty years of the splendid, pacific, and wise
rule of the Antonines; the most happy, to external appearance, which the
world ever knew. Their baneful influence appeared at once, when political
dangers commenced with the accession of Commodus. These doctrines are not
the less likely to be true that they are contrary to general opinion, that
they run counter to many important interests, that they are incapable of
present application, that they are adverse to the policy of the rulers of
the state. Government rules men, but Providence rules government, and will
in the end assert its supremacy, and right the moral evils of mankind, or
punish the sins of nations.

MY FIRST SPEC IN THE BIGGLESWADES.