Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Littell's Living Age, Vol. 19
No nation can, at any time', be secure from that cold qualm of social fear which is one of the most peculiar of human sensations. We English know nothing, personally, of the terror of looking and listeningfor an invad ing army, actually marching on our soil. We know only the milder forms of national fear; but their effect, once felt, is never e?'aced. The sensation, on being overtaken by the crash of 1825 - 6, by the Cholera of 1832 and 1849, by the Potato-rot of 1846, and the financial panics of 1847 and 1857, is as dis tinct in each case as the cases themselves; and yet the experience is unlike that of any other kind of dread. The same peculiar qualm has been sickening our hearts now, for some time past. If any hearts are not yet sick at the doom of Lancashire and Cheshire, they have to become so; and it cer tainly seems to me that those are happiest who were the earliest to perceive the truth. Ours is a country blessed beyond every other, in regard to the blessings which we prize most. It is impossible to overrate the priv ilege of living in England: but even here we are not safe from national af?ictions, taking the form of rebuke for our follies and sins. We have the sensation now of being under rebuke, and of having to suffer for some time to come, after many years of welfare which seemed to have grown into a confirmed habit of prosperity. The sensation is very painful. It is not to be shirked on that account, but rather treated with reverence, that it may impress upon us what it is that we ought to do.
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