The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1846-09-15 00:00:00

SEPT. 1

.5, 1846

Two years ago the people of this empire absolutely
revelled in visions of extending greatness, which no
hand could arrest, and of individual and national
prosperit,-, beyond the reach of check or reverse.
Wherever our arms were put forth to chastise or to
subdue, victory ;ollowed them. Into whatever re-
gion we sought to extend our commerce, wealth
flowed in upon us as the natural result of our efforts.
Science was doing mighty things for us within our
own realm : opening out its mineral wealth—almost
annihilating time and space—and bringing together,
within a few hours' journey, the congregated masses
of our busy hives of industry—enabling the east to
know the west, the north to know and converse
with the south. The hallucinations of our pride
whispered to us that the rules and the wisdom of
the rest of mankind were not for us; that our high
destinies were to be wrought out by unaided philo-
sophy ; that we had found out a new path to in-
creased wealth and territorial importance, to pursue
which successfully it needed not that we should
retain what were presumptuously styled the " swad-
dling clothes" of past experience—that salutary
protection, by which we had been enabled to attain
our then high position amongst the nations of the
world.

We forgot, in our vanity, that there is a Being
above us, who holds the destinies of every people
in his hands; in whose sole power it is to set up
and to pull down on earth. We forgot the teach-
ings of all past history, human and divine. We
overlooked the thousand lessons breathed forth
throughout the material as well as the natural
world—what small and insignificant means are
Sufficient, when guided or 'permitted by him, to
overthrow the projects and the power of the power-
ful. A needle, a pulley, or a crank out of its place,
is sufficient to destroy the mighty engine, whose
labours give bread to thousands. An unseen rock,
no bigger than a man's hand, will sink the mighti-
est fabric of human pride and power which sails the
ocean. An insect strips the noblest ornament of
our forests of its foliage, whilst a worm at its root
levels with the ground the stately trunk, which the
storms of a thousand years have not sufficed to
bend.

We are about to be reminded, by bitter experi-
ence and calamity, of the error and blindness of
which, in our presumption, we have been guilty.
We are about to be shewn how little it is in the
power of the mere statesman or the philosopher to
advance permanently the prosperity of an individual
r a people. Man proposes, but God disposes.
We were this year to witness the pouring of abun-
dance into this land. The depreciation and the
partial loss of one humble root, which we have
wrongfully permitted to become the almost sole
source of subsistence for millions of our poorer
classes, has shattered our expectations to the winds,
and brought impending famine and death over the
land

k blight has fallen upon our potato fields,
which are blackening and rotting before the eyes of
the husbandman, and spreading despair amid the
hearts of our unfortunate poor, to whom that crop
is the only resource from starvation. Can our
savans, our philosophers, our political economists,
trace the cause or retard the approach of this dire
No: science and philosophy are alike