Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/255

 were sent for the honour and benefit of England.' But while putting his finger on the weak points in the national armour, he does so in no desponding spirit, but in the belief that he can thereby stir the public conscience and secure their reform, if not their removal, by an appeal to the conscience and understanding of a progressive and vigorous people.

There always have been and there ever will be those who are able to detect around them the signs of the approaching ruin of their country and of the dissolution of society, and also believe that they can distinctly recollect the time when things wore a more promising aspect. For minds so constituted the best medicine would perhaps be a course of the writings of the pessimist literature of previous generations, and the perusal of the unfulfilled prophecies of the authors. The desponding philosopher of the nineteenth century might find consolation from learning how Mr. Sedgwick, who was an Under-Secretary of State in 1767—a year now generally considered one in which the reputation of the country stood at a high pitch in the prosperous period which intervened between the Peace of 1763 and the commencement of the American war—declared that 'it became more evident every day that this our country is so clearly on the high road to ruin, that nothing as it seems but a miracle can save it.' Even the elements he declares were in sympathy with the gloom of the political prospect, for 'the seasons,' he observes, 'are totally changed in this country, and one of them is quite done away. We are not now to expect warm weather till the autumn, and may therefore as well dismiss the word summer from our language as being no longer of any use, in reference to our own country at least.' Nor did Mr. Sedgwick stand alone, for a congenial spirit, Mr. Waite, writing in the gloomy atmosphere of Dublin Castle, was clearly of opinion that not England only, but 'the great globe itself, as well as those who inhabit it, seems hastening to a final period,' and 'that the spirit of the Devil was gone forth over the whole British Empire, and Satan seemed to be hastening his kingdom.'