; implements and utensils
more apt; a dwelling more commodious and better furnished;--let these be
attained, say the actively benevolent, and we are sure not only of being
in the right road, but of having successfully terminated our journey.
Now a country may advance, for some time, in this course with apparent
profit: these accommodations, by zealous encouragement, may be attained:
and still the Peasant or Artisan, their master, be a slave in mind; a
slave rendered even more abject by the very tenure under which these
possessions are held: and--if they veil from us this fact, or reconcile
us to it--they are worse than worthless. The springs of emotion may be
relaxed or destroyed within him; he may have little thought of the past,
and less interest in the future.--The great end and difficulty of life
for men of all classes, and especially difficult for those who live by
manual labour, is a union of peace with innocent and laudable animation.
Not by bread alone is the life of Man sustained; not by raiment alone is
he warmed;--but by the genial and vernal inmate of the breast, which at
once pushes forth and cherishes; by self-support and self-sufficing
endeavours; by anticipations, apprehensions, and active remembrances; by
elasticity under insult, and firm resistance to injury; by joy, and by
love; by pride which his imagination gathers in from afar; by patience,
because life wants not promises; by admiration; by gratitude
which--debasing him not when his fellow-being is its object--habitually
expands itself, for his elevation, in complacency towards his Creator.

Now, to the existence of these blessings, national independence is
indispensible; and many of them it will itself produce and maintain. For
it is some consolation to those who look back upon the history of the
world to know--that, even without civil liberty, society may
possess--diffused through its inner recesses in the minds even of its
humblest members--something of dignified enjoyment. But, without
national independence, this is impossible. The difference, between
inbred oppression and that which is from without, is _essential_;
inasmuch as the former does not exclude, from the minds of a people, the
feeling of being self-governed; does not imply (as the latter does, when
patiently submitted to) an abandonment of the first duty imposed by the
faculty of reason. In reality: where this feeling has no place, a people
are not a society, but a herd; man being ind