ahead in the race of knowledge give to those who need; guide those who stumble in the dark; and each, thus putting in his mite of well doing in the cause, ward off, as much as possible, the calamities which necessarily hover round the great and progressive change through which the world is passing. Great changes are oftenest wrought out only through great convulsions. It is a man’s work, and man’s heart is in it, when the humblest individual, with shoulder to the wheel, stands boldly and honestly forth, to raise his hand in warding off the avalanche of evil.
France, which now stands before the world, in the agonies of her struggles—great alike in truth and in error—France has experimented, and written for us, in her sufferings, a mighty lesson. May we but read and learn it! Revelling in the madness of newly-gained freedom, her people not knowing the use of what they had seized, for them it became the synonyme of license. Rushing from extreme to extreme, they forgot that liberty was but enfranchisement, and, with “democracy” for their watchword, exercised a despotism much more fearful than that of the single tyrant, because its power, like its name, was “legion.”
And what is the result? Credit dead; industry paralyzed; commerce annihilated; her starving people now sinking despondent under their difficulties—now driven to the madness of revolt, against they know not whom—asking, they know not what. France, terrified at her own acts, calls out for succour, and on every side resound the answers of her best and wisest citizens: “Step back from your errors; give truth its way”—“laissez passer”—“laissez faire.”
Amidst the throng of confused theories, each of which burns into the very vitals of the suffering State, its brand of crime and folly,
“While lean-looked prophets whisper fearful change,”
political economy alone, with its great and simple truths, seems to hold forth some hope of a real regeneration. It alone enjoins upon its disciples to follow, step by step—to sift to the bottom its theories and their remotest effects—before launching the world upon untried experiments. It alone gropes patiently its way, grappling
