While Mechanic Arts, Manufactures, Agriculture, Commerce, and all those products of knowledge which are confined to gross--definite--and tangible objects, have, with the aid of Experimental Philosophy, been every day putting on more brilliant colours; the splendour of the Imagination has been fading: Sensibility, which was formerly a generous nursling of rude Nature, has been chased from its ancient range in the wide domain of patriotism and religion with the weapons of derision by a shadow calling itself Good Sense: calculations of presumptuous Expediency--groping its way among partial and temporary consequences--have been substituted for the dictates of paramount and infallible Conscience, the supreme embracer of consequences: lifeless and circumspect Decencies have banished the graceful negligence and unsuspicious dignity of Virtue.
The progress of these arts also, by furnishing such attractive stores of outward accommodation, has misled the higher orders of society in their more disinterested exertions for the service of the lower.

Animal comforts have been rejoiced over, as if they were the end of being.

A neater and more fertile garden; a greener field; 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.