Reason with them is a mathematical force that acts with most certainty in the absence of experience, in the vacuum of pure speculation. These secure alarmists and dreaming guardians of the state are like superannuated watchmen enclosed in a sentry-box, that never hear ‘when thieves break through and steal.’ They put an oil-skin over their heads, that the dust raised by the passions and interests of the countless, ever-moving multitude, may not annoy or disturb the clearness of their vision. They build a Penitentiary, and are satisfied that Dyot-street, Bloomsbury-square, will no longer send forth its hordes of young delinquents, ‘an aerie of children,’ the embryo performers on locks and pockets for the next generation. They put men into a Panopticon, like a glass hive, to carry on all sorts of handicrafts (‘——So work the honey-bees’—) under the omnipresent eye of the inventor, and want and idleness are banished from the world. They propose to erect a Chrestomathic school, by cutting down some fine old trees on the classic ground where Milton thought and wrote, to introduce a rabble of children, who for the Greek and Latin languages, poetry, and history, that fine pabulum of useful enthusiasm, that breath of immortality infused into our youthful blood, that balm and cordial of our future years, are to be drugged with chemistry and apothecaries’ receipts, are to be taught to do every thing, and to see and feel nothing;—that the grubbing up of elegant arts and polite literature may be followed by the systematic introduction of accomplished barbarism and mechanical quackery. Such enlightened geniuses would pull down Stonehenge to build pig-sties, and would convert Westminster Abbey into a central House of Correction. It would be in vain to point to the arched windows, ‘Shedding a dim, religious light,’