Mr. Owen may think that we have all this while been jesting, when we have been in sad and serious earnest. Well, then, we will give him the reason why we differ with him, out of ‘an old saw,’ as good as most ‘modern instances.’ It is contained in this sentence:—‘If to do were as easy as to teach others what were good to be done, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.’ Our author has discovered no new theory; he has advanced no new reasons. The former reasons were never answered, but the plan did not succeed. Why then does he think _his_ must? All that he has done has been to leave out the reasons for his paradoxes, and to give his conclusions in capitals. This may take for a time with Mr. Wilberforce and the Methodists, who like hieroglyphics, but it cannot last. Here is a plan, strange as it may seem, ‘a new View of Society,’ published by two of our most loyal booksellers, and what is still more extraordinary, puffed in _The Courier_ as an extremely practical, practicable, solid, useful, and good sort of work, which proposes no less than to govern the world without religion and without law, by the force of reason alone! This project is in one of its branches dedicated to the Prince Regent, by which (if carried into effect) he would be stuck up in his life-time as ‘a useless piece of antiquity’; and in another part is dedicated to Mr. Wilberforce, though it would by the same rule convert that little vital member of the community into ‘a monkey preacher,’ crying in the wilderness with no one to hear him, and sneaking about between his character and his conscience, in a state of ludicrous perplexity, as indeed he always appears to be at present! What is most remarkable is, that Mr. Owen is the first philosopher we ever heard of, who recommended himself to the great by telling them disagreeable truths. A man that comes all the way from the banks of the Clyde acquires a projectile force that renders him irresistible. He has access, we understand, to the men in office, to the members of parliament, to lords and gentlemen. He comes to ‘pull an old house about their ears,’ to batter down all their establishments, new or old, in church or in state, civil, political, and military, and he quietly walks into their houses with his credentials in his pocket, and reconciles them to the prospect of the innumerable Houses of Industry he is about to erect on the site of their present sinecures, by assuring them of the certainty of his principles and the infallibility of his practice, in building up and pulling down. His predecessors were clumsy fellows; but he is an engineer, who will be sure to do their business for them. He is not the man to set the Thames on fire, but he will move the world, and New Lanark is the place he has fixed his lever upon for this purpose. To shew that he goes roundly to work with great people in developing his formidable system of the formation of character, he asks, p. 7 of the second Essay,—