The Effects of Civilisation on the People in European States/Section VI
SECTION VI.
THEIR MORAL AND SPIRITUAL INSTRUCTION NEGLECTED.
We have seen how manufactures tend to the utter exclusion of all rational improvement of the mind. We may further observe, that they generally tend to the prevention of moral and spiritual improvement. To speak, first, as to the latter; though, perhaps, it might be deemed presumptuous in me to say anything on that subject.
The proof of the Christian system is founded on historical facts; from thence are drawn the principal motives of credibility, as they are called. We give credit to facts recorded in history, when they are related by an historian of credit; when other historians agree with him; and from the concurrence of other circumstances.[1] But what idea has a totally ignorant man of the weight of the concurrence of historians, or the coincidence of facts? or what knowledge of history at all? Certainly none. Hence, being deprived of the belief, he of course is deprived of all the other advantages of religion.
With respect to morals: Civilisation has a two-fold effect on the morals of the people; first, by depriving them of their original share of things, and reducing them to a state of both comparative and absolute poverty, it subjects them to more and much stronger temptations. Secondly, by their extreme ignorance, and little sense of religion in consequence of it, they are deprived of the strongest motives to resist them. Thus, all their temptations rendered stronger, their powers of resistance weaker, they could not be expected to be different from what we find them.[2]
- ↑ Education has since been much extended.—Ed.
- ↑ To suffer the lower orders of the people to be ill-educated, to be totally inattentive to those wise regulations of State policy which might serve to guard and improve their morals, and then to punish them for crimes which originated from bad habits, has the appearance of a cruelty not less severe than any which is exercised under the most despotic government.—Treatise on Police, &c., by P. Colquhoun, LL.D.