National Life and Character: A Forecast

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Macmillan and Company, 1893 - Moral conditions - 357 pages
 

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Page 246 - The want of affection in the English is strongly manifested towards their children ; for after having kept them at home till they arrive at the age of seven or nine years...
Page 6 - ... by immediate direction) presume even to mention privileges and freedom, who, till of late, received directions from the throne with implicit humility ; when this is considered, I cannot help fancying that the genius of freedom has entered that kingdom in disguise. If they have but three weak monarchs more successively on the throne, the mask will be laid aside, and the country will certainly once more be free.
Page 96 - Fortescue could exult that more Englishmen were hanged for robbery in one year, than French in seven, and that " if an Englishman be poor, and see another having riches, which may be taken from him by might, he will not spare to do so/'* it may be perceived how thoroughly these sentiments had pervaded the public mind.
Page 342 - We reply, that to work in vain, in the sense of producing means of life which are not used, embryos which are never vivified, germs which are not developed ; is so far from being contrary to the usual proceedings of nature, that it is an operation which is constantly going on, in every part of nature.
Page 108 - We have observed that, as a general rule, the business of life is better performed when those who have an immediate interest in it are left to take their own course, uncontrolled either by the mandate of the law or by the meddling of any public functionary.
Page 304 - ... it is melancholy to say it, but the chief, perhaps the only, English writer who has any claim to be considered an ecclesiastical historian, is the infidel Gibbon.
Page 5 - ... all the symptoms which I have ever met with in history, previous to great changes and revolutions in Government, now exist, and daily increase in France.
Page 130 - Let us conceive the leading European nations to be stationary, while the Black and Yellow Belt, including China, Malaysia, India, Central Africa, and Tropical America, is all teeming with life, developed by industrial enterprise, fairly well administered by native governments, and owning the better part of the carrying trade of the world. Can any one suppose that, in such a condition of political society...
Page 2 - He had, in the highest degree, that noble faculty whereby man is able to live in the past and in the future, in the distant and in the unreal. India and its inhabitants were not to him, as to most Englishmen, mere names and abstractions, but a real country and a real people. The burning sun, the strange vegetation of the palm and the...
Page 291 - Every astronomer knows that there was only one secret of the universe to be discovered, and that when Newton told it to the world the supreme triumph of astronomy was achieved. Whether...

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