They make space, and give time. Their exertions are of the highest
value, so long as they confine their administration of the concerns
of the inferior powers of our nature within the limits due to the
superior ones. But whilst the sceptic destroys gross superstitions,
let him spare to deface, as some of the French writers have defaced,
the eternal truths charactered upon the imaginations of men. Whilst
the mechanist abridges, and the political economist combines labour,
let them beware that their speculations, for want of correspondence
with those first principles which belong to the imagination, do not
tend, as they have in modern England, to exasperate at once the extremes
of luxury and want. They have exemplified the saying, "To him that
hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little that
he hath shall be taken away". The rich have become richer, and the
poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the state is driven between
the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are the effects
which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating
faculty.
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