Page:The Factory Controversy - Martineau (1855).djvu/15

 the sale of Tennyson's "Maud;" and the interest in the Paris Exposition, and almost every sign of the time that can be adduced. It ought not to be true, and it is not true, that the war has made us disregard objects of genuine interest and importance.

If it had, we should now have felt bound to make a solemn appeal to the fears of our fellow-citizens, where we hope and believe that it will he enough simply to request and attract their attention. If we believed that their wits were wool-gathering in the East, we should recal them by a loud alarm about the danger of their liberties at home; but, confident as we are, that our neighbours are nearly as much in earnest as ever about affairs at home, we feel that we need only put before them certain facts of the day to induce them to watch their own liberties while sacrificing so largely as they are doing on behalf of those of all Europe.

One of the fair features of the just war in which we are engaged is, that it is sweeping away some of the corruptions, and rehabilitating some of the degeneracies bred by the long peace. One of the duties of patriotism is to see that the besom is not turned from its course by fear or favour; that no damp, dirty corner is shut up from purification, in the hope that people will be too much engrossed to find it out: and it is in discharge of this duty that we now call attention to certain facts, showing that the false philanthropy, which is one of the bad growths of the recent time—the proud-flesh of our body politic—is corrupting our social condition, and encroaching on the very principles of our liberties, as actively as before the war began. For twenty years past, the most enlightened and reflective men in all advanced nations have lamented, as the most disastrous of the ignorances and incapacities of the time, the universal disorder of men's minds on the all-important point of the true sphere and proper duties of government. In England, where there are no revolutions going forward,—either periodical,