There is no art whatever in which, however ardent and sincere our desire to succeed, we can dispense with knowledge of the nature and conditions of the object aimed at. Moral and political conduct is assuredly not exempt from such an obligation, although we are more influenced in this case by the direct promptings of feeling than in any other of the arts of life. It has been shown only too clearly by many striking instances how far Social Feeling may lead us astray when it is not directed by right principles. It was for want of fixed convictions that the noble sympathies entertained by the French nation for the rest of Europe at the outset of the Revolution so soon degenerated into forcible oppression, when her retrograde leader began his seductive appeal to selfish passions. Inverse cases are still more common; and they illustrate the connexion of feeling and opinion as clearly as the others. A false social doctrine has often favoured the natural ascendency of Self-love by giving a perverted conception of public well-being. This has been too plainly exemplified in our own time by the deplorable influence which Malthus’s sophistical theory of population obtained in England. This mischievous error met with very little acceptance in the rest of Europe, and it has been already refuted by the nobler thinkers of his own country; but it still gives the show of scientific sanction to the criminal antipathy of the governing classes in Great Britain to all effectual measures of reform.