i
BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
EDINBURGH:
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AND 37 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.
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PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.257
BLACKWOOD'S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
THE DANGERS OF THE COUNTRY.
NO. II.—OUR INTERNAL DANGERS.
"The apparent contradiction,"says the Edinburgh Review, "betweenthe vast amount of unrelievedmisery in the country, and the vastamount of energetic benevolence nowexisting in this country, which strikesso many with despair, inspires us, onthe contrary, with the most sanguinehopes; because, in that benevolence,we see ample means of remedyingnearly all our social evils,—meansheretofore impotent solely becausemisapplied. We agree with theSocialists in holding that the worldcan never have been intended to be,and will not long remain, what it is.It cannot be that the same intellectwhich has wrung from nature hermost hidden secrets, which has triumphedover the most gigantic materialobstructions, which has 'exhaustedworlds and then imaginednew;' which has discovered and describedlaws operating in regions ofspace separate from us by a distanceso vast that human imagination cannotfigure it and