es. You are not accustomed to have the truth told you to
your faces. Why, my good friends, the people in this country, who
are unworthy of the great trust which the wise and generous English
constitution places in their hands, are so numerous that they can be
divided into distinct classes! There is the highly-educated class
which despairs, and holds aloof. There is the class beneath--without
self-respect, and therefore without public spirit--which can be bribed
indirectly, by the gift of a place, by the concession of a lease, even
by an invitation to a party at a great house which includes the wives
and the daughters. And there is the lower class still--mercenary,
corrupt, shameless to the marrow of its bones--which sells itself and
its liberties for money and drink. When I began this discourse,
and adverted to great changes that are to come, I spoke of them as
revolutionary changes. Am I an alarmist? Do I unjustly ignore the
capacity for peaceable reformation which has preserved modern England
from revolutions, thus far? God forbid that I should deny the truth, or
that I should alarm you without need! But history tells me, if I look no
farther back than to the first French Revolution, that there are social
and political corruptions, which strike their roots in a nation
so widely and so deeply, that no force short of the force of a
revolutionary convulsion can tear them up and cast them away. And I do
personally fear (and older and wiser men than I agree with me), that
the corruptions at which I have only been able to hint, in this brief
address, are fast extending themselves--in England, as well as in Europe
generally--beyond the reach of that lawful and bloodless reform which
has served us so well in past years. Whether I am mistaken in this view
(and I hope with all my heart it may be so), or whether events yet in
the future will prove that I am right, the remedy in either case,
the one sure foundation on which a permanent, complete, and worthy
reformation can be built--whether it prevents a convulsion or whether
it follows a convulsion--is only to be found within the covers of this
book. Do not, I entreat you, suffer yourselves to be persuaded by those
purblind philosophers who assert that the divine virtue of Christianity
is a virtue which is wearing out with the lapse of time. It is the abuse
and corruption of Christianity that is wearing out--as all falsities
and all impostures must and do wear out. Never, since Ch