[The Prose Works of William Wordsworth by William Wordsworth]@TWC D-Link book
The Prose Works of William Wordsworth

PREFACE
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Let the expectation be familiar to them of open and manly institutions of law and liberty according to knowledge.

Let them be universally trained to military exercises, and accustomed to military discipline: let them be drawn together in civic and religious assemblies; and a general communication of those assemblies with each other be established through the country: so that there may be one zeal and one life in every part of it.
With great profit might the Chiefs of the Spanish Nation look back upon the earlier part of the French Revolution.

Much, in the outward manner, might there be found worthy of qualified imitation: and, where there is a difference in the inner spirit (and there is a mighty difference!), the advantage is wholly on the side of the Spaniards .-- Why should the People of Spain be dreaded by their leaders?
I do not mean the profligate and flagitious leaders; but those who are well-intentioned, yet timid.

That there are numbers of this class who have excellent intentions, and are willing to make large personal sacrifices, is clear; for they have put every thing to risk--all their privileges, their honours, and possessions--by their resistance to the Invader.

Why then should they have fears from a quarter--whence their safety must come, if it come at all ?--Spain has nothing to dread from Jacobinism.
Manufactures and Commerce have there in far less degree than elsewhere--by unnaturally clustering the people together--enfeebled their bodies, inflamed their passions by intemperance, vitiated from childhood their moral affections, and destroyed their imaginations.
Madrid is no enormous city, like Paris; over-grown, and disproportionate; sickening and bowing down, by its corrupt humours, the frame of the body politic.


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