heart—the longing, seeking, hungering for truth—is roused; and, in its eager search, how often, alas! is the will-o-the-wisp mistaken for the star-beam! Through one of these crises are we now struggling. The world is in labour of a great truth, but its sick fancy is cheated with the bewildering dazzle of its own delirious dreams.
One of society’s closest guards—a kind of shepherd’s dog, as it were, of the flock—stands political economy. Watching, barking, wrangling at every intruder, suspicious of outward show, nor satisfied with skin-deep inspection, it examines, before admitting all pretenders as true prophets, and strips many a wolf of his sheep’s clothing. The evil-inclined, thus, naturally, hoot and revile it. The ignorant mistrust it. What do we, its advocates, ask in its defence? Simply nothing, but that the world should learn to know it. We wish no law for its imposition—no tax for its protection. Let truth be but heard: there is in the heart of man an instinct to know and to seize it. Error is simply negative; like shadow, it is only want of light. Heaven’s sunbeam on the material world—reason’s effulgence on the thinking soul—alone suffice to work God’s purposes. Man, his humble instrument, cannot make the light; he can but strive to remove the obstacles which intercept its abundant flow.
We ask, then, only to be heard. Let the world know us. Let the people know us. Let political economy be the science of the crowd. It is neither incomprehensible nor abstruse. It requires but that each individual man should think,—think—not imagine, not dream, not utopianize—but think, study, and understand for himself. Where the masses are ignorant, what more natural than that they stumble into wrong? Mind must act; and more and more, as the world advances, does it call for the right of exerting and developing its power. In earlier ages, learning, information, thought, being limited to the few, the masses took the word from these high-priests of reason, whose veiled holy of holies was sacred from the intrusion of the crowd. But, now, the veil is rent asunder. Not you, nor we, nor he—nor any chosen one—nor ten, nor twenty—but man,—now claims the right to think for himself. He claims it; he will have it; he ought to have it. Let but those who are
