Page:The Factory Controversy - Martineau (1855).djvu/14

 importance and interest, because we saw, as any body may see who chooses to look, that science, art, manufactures, and education, made progress during the very worst days of the List war. When the Berlin Decrees were in full force; when the marine highway was as infested with enemies as the great roads of the Continent; when we had no allies, or worse than none, in carrying on the struggle for our national existence, we were trying our first experiments in popular education, working out the leading principles of political economy, developing our cotton manufacture, trying our first experiments with steam, laying the foundations of geological science, obtaining glimpses into an entirely new world through the avenues of chemistry, cataloguing the stars, enjoying enthusiasms about authors and new departments of literature, and going wild after Siddons and Catalani. After such an experience as that, it is really nonsense to talk of a stagnation of national interests through our present war. If, in the very crisis of our national existence and fortunes, Wollaston, and Davy, and Cavendish, and Maskelyne, and Herschel were extending the bounds of science; and Horner and Malthus were discovering principles and propounding theories in political economy; and the machinery of our cotton manufacture was adding two millions to our population; and the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews arose; and Wilberforce and Hannah More taught in adult schools; and Romilly reformed the criminal law; and musical festivals arose; and the stage was at its culminating point of influence and prosperity,—what an absurdity it seems to pretend that we are too busy with our one enemy, whom we have cooped up within his own frontier, to attend to national, or social, or personal objects! It ought not to be true, and it is not true: witness the amount of autumn travelling, and of autumn sporting this year, and the great round of agricultural celebrations; and the Glasgow meeting of the British Association; and the Birmingham Festival,—spirited, and successful beyond all precedent; and