The general view which Mr.Southey takes of the prospects of society is very gloomy; but we comfort ourselves with the consideration that Mr.Southey is no prophet.He foretold, we remember, on the very eve of the abolition of the Test and Corporation Acts, that these hateful laws were immortal, and that pious minds would long be gratified by seeing the most solemn religious rite of the Church profaned for the purpose of upholding her political supremacy.In the book before us, he says that Catholics cannot possibly be admitted into Parliament until those whom Johnson called "the bottomless Whigs" come into power.
While the book was in the press, the prophecy was falsified; and a Tory of the Tories, Mr.Southey's own favourite hero, won and wore that noblest wreath, "Ob cives servatos."The signs of the times, Mr.Southey tells us, are very threatening.His fears for the country would decidedly preponderate over his hopes, but for a firm reliance on the mercy of God.Now, as we know that God has once suffered the civilised world to be overrun by savages, and the Christian religion to be corrupted by doctrines which made it, for some ages, almost as bad as Paganism, we cannot think it inconsistent with his attributes that similar calamities should again befal mankind.
We look, however, on the state of the world, and of this kingdom in particular, with much greater satisfaction and with better hopes.Mr.Southey speaks with contempt of those who think the savage state happier than the social.On this subject, he says, Rousseau never imposed on him even in his youth.But he conceives that a community which has advanced a little way in civilisation is happier than one which has made greater progress.The Britons in the time of Caesar were happier, he suspects, than the English of the nineteenth century.On the whole, he selects the generation which preceded the Reformation as that in which the people of this country were better off than at any time before or since.
This opinion rests on nothing, as far as we can see, except his own individual associations.He is a man of letters; and a life destitute of literary pleasures seems insipid to him.He abhors the spirit of the present generation, the severity of its studies, the boldness of its inquiries, and the disdain with which it regards some old prejudices by which his own mind is held in bondage.He dislikes an utterly unenlightened age; he dislikes an investigating and reforming age.The first twenty years of the sixteenth century would have exactly suited him.
They furnished just the quantity of intellectual excitement which he requires.The learned few read and wrote largely.A scholar was held in high estimation.But the rabble did not presume to think; and even the most inquiring and independent of the educated classes paid more reverence to authority, and less to reason, than is usual in our time.This is a state of things in which Mr.Southey would have found himself quite comfortable;and, accordingly, he pronounces it the happiest state of things ever known in the world.
The savages were wretched, says Mr.Southey; but the people in the time of Sir Thomas More were happier than either they or we.
Now we think it quite certain that we have the advantage over the contemporaries of Sir Thomas More, in every point in which they had any advantage over savages.
Mr.Southey does not even pretend to maintain that the people in the sixteenth century were better lodged or clothed than at present.He seems to admit that in these respects there has been some little improvement.It is indeed a matter about which scarcely any doubt can exist in the most perverse mind that the improvements of machinery have lowered the price of manufactured articles, and have brought within the reach of the poorest some conveniences which Sir Thomas More or his master could not have obtained at any price.
